298 LIFE AND HABIT. 



ing listener, without which last, though much may have 

 been said, there has been nothing told so also it takes 

 two people, as it were, to "remember" a thing the crea- 

 ture remembering, and the surroundings of the creature 

 at the time it last remembered. Hence, though the 

 ovum immediately after impregnation is instinct with 

 all the memories of both parents, not one of these 

 memories can normally become active till both the 

 ovum itself, and its surroundings, are sufficiently like 

 what they respectively were, when the occurrence now 

 to be remembered last took place. The memory will 

 then immediately return, and the creature will do as it 

 did on the last occasion that it was in like case as now. 

 This ensures that similarity of order shall be preserved 

 in all the stages of development, in successive genera- 

 tions. 



Life, then, is faith founded upon experience, which 

 experience is in its turn founded upon faith or more 

 simply, it is memory. Plants and animals only differ 

 from one another because they remember different 

 things ; plants and animals only grow up in the shapes 

 they assume because this shape is their memory, their 

 idea concerning their own past history. 



Hence the term " Natural History," as applied to the 

 different plants and animals around us. For surely the 

 study of natural history means only the study of plants 

 and animals themselves, which, at the moment of using 

 the words " Natural History," we assume to be the most 

 important part of nature. 



A living creature well supported by a mass of healthy 

 ancestral memory is a young and growing creature, free 



