190 PROBLEMS OF GENETICS 



arose from preconception rather than from evidence, it is worth 

 observing that, rightly considered, the probability should surely 

 be the other way. For the adaptations relate to every variety 

 of exigency. To supply themselves with food, to find it, to seize 

 and digest it, to protect themselves from predatory enemies 

 whether by offence or defence, to counter-balance the changes 

 of temperature, or pressure, to provide for mechanical strains, 

 to obtain immunity from poison and from invading organisms, 

 to bring the sexual elements into contact, to ensure the dis- 

 tribution of the type; all these and many more are accomplished 

 by organisms in a thousand most diverse and alternative methods. 

 Those are the things that are hard to imagine as produced by 

 any concatenation of natural events; but the suggestions that 

 organisms had had from the beginning innate in them a power 

 of modifying themselves, their organs and their instincts so as 

 to meet these multifarious requirements does not materially 

 differ from the more overt appeals to supernatural intervention. 

 The conception, originally introduced by Hering and inde- 

 pendently by S. Butler, that adaptation is a consequence or 

 product of accumulated memory was of late revived by Semon 

 and has been received with some approval, especially by F. 

 Darwin. I see nothing fantastic in the notion that memory 

 may be unconsciously preserved with the same continuity that 

 the protoplasmic basis of life possesses. That idea, though 

 purely speculative and, as yet, incapable of proof or disproof 

 contains nothing which our experience of matter or of life at all 

 refutes. On the contrary, we probably do well to retain the 

 suggestion as a clue that may some day be of service. But if 

 adaptation is to be the product of these accumulated experiences, 

 they must in some way be translated into terms of physiological and 

 structural change, a process frankly inconceivable. 



To attempt any representation of heredity as a product of 

 memory is, moreover, to substitute the more obscure for the 

 less. Both are now inscrutable; but while we may not unreason- 

 ably aspire to analyse heredity into simpler components by or- 

 dinary methods of research, the case of memory is altogether 

 different. Memory is a mystery as deep as any that even psy- 



