408 THE EVOLUTION OF MEMORY 



of Baldwin, Osborn, and Lloyd Morgan l is of course memory, but 

 the fact is nowhere recognized. Nor, indeed, is the importance of 

 the so-called plasticity appreciated. " Professor Morgan here 

 develops (Chap. XIV., Habit and Instinct) a suggestion which has 

 been put forth by Professor H. F. Osborn, and independently 

 reached by the present writer, as Morgan points out, namely, that 

 by learning intelligently and imitatively to do the things which 

 are essential, certain animals are screened from the operation of 

 Natural Selection, and so hand on their capacities to future 

 generations, while the race accumulates further congenital varia- 

 tions in the same directions (what Morgan calls ' Coincident 

 variations '). Thus evolution takes the direction marked out in 

 the first instance by the individual's learning." 2 In other words, 

 it is supposed by Baldwin, Morgan, and Osborn that useful 

 acquirements may enable a race or a line of individuals to survive 

 until the descendants have varied in such a way that the useful 

 traits appear in them, not under the stimulus of experience, but 

 under that of nutriment. 3 In this way, as according to Lewes' 

 theory though not as he supposed by the transmission of acquire- 

 ments, that which was intelligent in ancestors becomes instinctive 

 in descendants. For example, if learning to swim or to speak a 

 language enabled ancestors to survive, it is supposed the descendants 

 may vary so as to swim or speak instinctively. That is, unthinking 

 impulse is supposed to be substituted in descendants for learning, 

 thought, intelligence, and reason in ancestors. This theory, of 

 course, affords an instance of the prevalent biological obsession 

 that nutritional characters are more important, more innate, more 

 a possession of the species than characters which develop under 

 the stimulus of use and experience the latter being regarded as 

 mere accidents limited to the individual and not like nutritional 

 characters, part of the heritage of the race. The whole course of 

 the evolution of the higher animals demonstrates the erroneousness 

 of this opinion. So far from the ' innate ' replacing the ' acquired,' 

 the contrary is the invariable rule. For example, in man the 

 highest and the latest product of evolution, that which is ' inborn ' 

 is at its minimum, while that which is * acquired ' is at its maximum. 

 It is not realized by the writers mentioned that to the animals that 

 have the power of making acquirements, these characters are 



1 See, for example, Development and Evolution, by James Mark Baldwin (The 

 Macmillan Company), and Animal Behaviour, byC. Lloyd Morgan, p. 172 (Arnold). 

 Neither of these authors mention memory. At any rate I can find no mention, 

 and the word does not occur in their indices. 



8 Development and Evolution, pp. 390-1. 3 See 114. 



