HEREDITY AND ARRANGEMENT " 133 



any more than the acorn resembles the oak which 

 is to spring from it. 



But observe ! the germ on this view must con- 

 tain not only seeds from the immediate parents 

 but from many, perhaps all, of the older genera- 

 tions of the family, otherwise how are we to 

 account for the appearance of ancestral peculiari- 

 ties which the father and mother do not show ? 

 Moreover, since very minute things, like the inner 

 angle of the eyebrow, may independently vary, 

 there must be an enormous number of seeds apart 

 altogether from the considerations alluded to in 

 the last paragraph. And many authorities who 

 have closely considered the question have come 

 to the conclusion that the complexities introduced 

 would be so great that it is impossible to believe 

 in any micromeristic theory. 



Then, of course, we must look out for some 

 other explanation, and some have suggested that 

 it is to be found in memory the memory of the 

 germ of what it was once part and the anticipa- 

 tion of what it may once more be. This again is 

 an explanation not susceptible of proof along the 

 lines of a chemical experiment, but not necessarily, 

 therefore, untrue. Of course there are two ideas 

 as to memory. If we are pure materialists and 

 imagine every memory in our possession as some- 

 thing stamped, in some wholly incomprehensible 

 manner, on some cell of our brain and looked at 

 there, by some wholly inconceivable agency, when 

 we sit down to think of past days, then we must 

 look on the germ, under the " mnemic " or 

 memory theory as consisting of fragments each of 



