president's address. 15 



that specific are more variable than generic characters — a fact for which it 

 is ' almost superfluous to adduce evidence.' ' This, again, is what we find 

 in habit : take the case of a man who, from his youth up, has daily 

 repeated a certain form of words. If in middle life an addition is made 

 to the formula, he will find the recently acquired part more liable to vary 

 than the rest. 



Again, there is the wonderful fact that, as the ovum develops into 

 the perfect organism, it passes through a series of changes which are 

 believed to represent the successive forms through which its ancestors 

 passed in the process of evolution. This is precisely paralleled by our 

 own experience of memory, for it often happens that we cannot reproduce 

 the last learned verse of a poem without repeating the earlier part ; each 

 verse is suggested by the previous one and acts as a stimulus for the 

 next. The blurred and imperfect character of the ontogenetic version 

 of the phylogenetic series may at least remind us of the tendency to 

 abbreviate by omission what we have learned by heart. 



In all bisexual organisms the ontogenetic rhythm of the offspring is 

 a combination of the rhythms of its parents. This may or may not be 

 visible in the offspring ; thus in the crossing of two varieties the mongrel 

 assumes the character of the prepotent parent. Or the offspring may 

 show a blend of both parental characters. Semon ^ uses as a model the 

 two versions of Goethe's poem — 



• Ueber alien Gipfeln. ist Ruh, in alien I Z^^fT ' ^'^■^'\ f' l"'"'" ^^"""u v, - 

 ^ ' (^ Wipieln, spurest du, kaum einen Hauch. 



One of these terminations will generally be prepotent, probably the one 

 that was heard first or heard most often. But the cause of such pre- 

 potency may be as obscure as the corresponding occurrence in the forma- 

 tion of mongrels. We can only say that in some persons the word ' alien' 

 releases the word ' Waldern,' while in others it leads up to ' Wipfeln.' 

 Again, a mixture of the terminations may occur leading to such a mongrel 

 form as : 'in alien Waldern horest du kaum einen Hauch.' The same 

 thing is true of music ; a man with an imperfect memory easily interpolates 

 in & melody a bar that belongs elsewhere. In the case of memory the 

 introduction of a link from one mental rhythm into another can only occur 

 when the two series are closely similar, and this may remind us of tho 

 difficulty of making a cross between distantly related forms. 



Enough has been said to show that there is a resemblance between 

 the two rhythms of development and of memory ; and that there is at 

 least a jjrimajacie case for believing them to be essentially similar. It 

 will be seen that my view is the same as that of Hering, which is 

 generally described as the identification of memory and inheritance.^ 



' Origin of Spcckst 6th edit,, p. 122. 



» Die Mneme, 2nd edit.; pp. 147, 221, 303, 345. 



' Everyone who deals with this subject must take his stand on tha foundation 

 laid by Hering in his celebrated address given at Vienna in 1870 and reprinted in 

 No. U3 of Ostwald's Exakt Klassi/cer. The passage quoted (p. IG) is from Samual 



