THE STATION AND SCIENCE 281 



a chokepear to the psychologists. It is no stumbling- 

 block now. Five years later (in 1870) the German 

 biologist, Ewald Hering, affirmed that " memory is a 

 general property of organic matter," and five years 

 later still Ernst Haeckel enounced the hypothesis that 

 molecules of plasm which have the property of memory 

 are the vehicles of heredity. Haeckel even does not 

 see how heredity can be explained without this 

 assumption. Verily, daring and ingenuity are justified 

 of their children. 



The more hazardous speculation, identifying machines 

 with men, is now also passing into science. The suc- 

 cessor of Claude Bernard at the Sorbonne, Professor A. 

 Dastre, admits that science " envisages a vitality more 

 or less obscure in inanimate bodies." These, like 

 living bodies, consist of protoplasm, are organized, and 

 develop. Some of them, like crystals, have a specific 

 form and restore themselves by re-assimilation. Cry- 

 stals have also, in a manner, the faculty of nutrition 

 and even the power of reproduction. M. Dastre may 

 well write of " the life of matter." 



A more fantastic speculation still had its birth in 

 New Zealand, when Butler conceived souls to be wan- 

 dering in " the world of the unborn," as Matthew 

 Arnold's soul flitted " between two worlds — one dead, 

 the other powerless to be born." In Erewhon, however, 

 a way to the world of the born has been graciously 

 provided, and nowhere does the author's Addisonian 

 humour more playfully disport itself. The conception 

 of " musical banks," which is likewise of Antipodean 

 origin, was possibly suggested by certain political 

 proposals made in New Zealand. Lastly, the treatment 

 of disease as crime, which forms one of the most original 

 features of the book, had its origin in the colonies, where 

 rude health was, at that time, so general that ailments 

 brought there, still more than elsewhere, the penalties 

 of criminal offences. 



Books are the parents of books, and Erewhon, taken 

 together with Lord Lytton's Coming Race, almost 



