May 17, 1912] 
curator of osteology in the Peabody Museum 
of Yale University. 
Hiram BINGHAM, 
Director of the Expedition 
SAMUEL BUTLER AND BIOLOGICAL 
MEMORY 
THE present vogue of the books of Samuel 
Butler—not a great vogue but one fairly 
commensurate, perhaps, with the scientific 
worth and general interest of his writings— 
has led me to a rather critical reading of the 
four books and several scattered essays of this 
partly scientific, partly artistic, mostly icono- 
clastic, and wholly clever and epigrammatic 
modern namesake of the greater Samuel 
Butler of two centuries gone. 
He finds himself dubbed in the British 
Museum Library catalogue as “ philosophical 
writer,” being alphabetically bestowed be- 
tween “Samuel Butler, bishop” and “Sam- 
uel Butler, poet”; and in one of his essays 
tells a pretty story to account for his title. 
The library catalogue is, as many will 
recall, printed and pasted in huge tomes, 
hundreds of them, and changes in its ar- 
rangement are not easily made. When our 
Butler found himself beginning to get 
into the catalogue he found also that he was 
getting mixed up with his namesake bishop 
and his namesake poet, and as yet he had 
no distinguishing title of his own. - When 
he complained to the Library directors of his 
trouble it was pointed out to him that it was 
largely his own fault in not having sufficient 
distinction or distinctiveness to be classified 
properly. He must have a title. What was 
he, really? His writings were partly about 
Italian art, partly about the authorship of the 
Odyssey, partly about evolution and partly of 
the nature of-stories. How was he to be dis- 
tinguished? Had he any title? He replied, 
after meditation, that he was a Bachelor of 
Arts. The director pointed out that as far as 
his book titles were not actually confused 
with those of the bishop and poet, they were 
pasted in between theirs, and that if he were 
catalogued as “Samuel Butler, B.A.,” the 
strictly alphabetical sequence of the catalogue 
SCIENCE 
769 
would be wronged. Could he not, perhaps, ar- 
range to be a Master of Arts? Butler replied 
that he understood that Cambridge stood one 
a Master for five guineas, but he was not will- 
ing to go above three guineas ten! Well, any- 
way, was the answer, he must be “Samuel 
Butler, something, between bi and po!” So 
it was finally agreed that he should be “ Sam- 
uel Butler, philosophical writer ”—phi agree- 
ing properly with the order in which he had 
already been irrevocably pasted! 
Now this long digression, by way of intro- 
duction, from the subject of my letter, has 
after all a definite significance in relation to 
it. It has indeed, for me, at least, a double 
significance. It suggests something about 
British ways and something about the doubt 
as to how Samuel Butler’s writings, even the 
four books about Darwinism, Lamarckism 
and biological memory, should be classified. 
Are they contributions to science, or to pure 
literature? Certainly, they are contributions 
to the gaiety of nations when they are not, as 
occasionally they as certainly are, contribu- 
tions to that which makes the judicious to 
grieve. Whatever of sharpness in polemic 
one may tolerate in a critic of Darwinism, 
innuendo cnd really almost scurrilous per 
sonal attack on Charles Darwin one will not 
tolerate. And Butler comes to no less than 
this in his attempt to show Darwin’s bad faith 
in a matter of the use of a certain freely 
modified translation of an account of Erasmus 
Darwin by Krause, in Kosmos. 
Butler, though strongly anti-Darwinian 
(that is, anti-natural selection and anti- 
Charles Darwin) is not anti-evolutionist. He 
professes, indeed, to be very much of an eyo- 
lutionist, and in particular one who has 
taken it upon his shoulders to reinstate 
Buffon and Erasmus Darwin, and, as a fol- 
lower of these two, Lamarck, in their rightful 
place as the most believable explainers of the 
factors and method of evolution. His evolu- 
tion belief is a sort of Butlerized Lamarckism, 
tracing back originally to Buffon and Eras- 
mus Darwin. He is equally insistent on de- 
grading the explanations of Charles Darwin, 
Wallace and Weismann, viz., the selection 
