770 
champions, to their rightfully ignoble place 
of puerility and imbecility. And finally he is 
intent on reestablishing the factor of design 
in evolution. He holds strongly to a certain 
sort of teleology in organic change. Organ- 
isms make themselves what they are some- 
what understandingly, as it were. They know 
what is good for them, and try to do it and 
be it. 
Granted, now, that this man is a master of 
epigram, paradox, sophistication, argument 
and audacity, and of a literary style as ani- 
mated and sparkling as it is bold, and you 
can fancy that his books make interesting 
reading to professed students of evolution and 
to scientific men—at whom he sneers and 
laughs—as well as to those readers “whose 
time is worth money,” whom he exalts and to 
whom he explicitly directs his writing. 
The four books of this sort that were writ- 
ten originally some thirty years ago and that 
have been recently re-issued by Fifield in Lon- 
don and—I believe—Putnams in New York 
are: “Life and Habit” (1878), “Evolution, 
Old and New” (1879), “Unconscious Mem- 
ory” (1880) and “Luck or Cunning ” (1881). 
In 1890, in The Universal Review (London), 
he published three essays (really one in three 
parts) under the title “The Deadlock of 
Darwinism,” in which he reiterates the gen- 
eral conclusions and theories set out in detail 
in his earlier writing. 
In addition to these four books, offered as 
direct contributions to evolution discussion, 
a much earlier book, called “ Erewhon” 
(= Nowhere) (1872), contains in its pages 
of fantastic picturing and imagination the 
budding thoughts that later form the basis 
of his anti-Darwinism. Particularly in the 
chapter called “The Book of the Machines 2 
are his ideas of design and his denial of 
chance in world evolution set out. This book 
has had a wide diffusion, and is the one which 
really gave him literary repute. It is a pic- 
turesque account of the life and philosophy 
of the non-existent Erewhonians, and its 
pages reveal the imagination of a Wells and 
the satire of a Bernard Shaw. Shaw, indeed, 
has strongly commended it, and Augustine 
SCIENCE 
[N.S. Vou. XXXV. No. 907 
Birrell has called it the best satire since 
“Gulliver’s Travels.” 
And I have not yet got to a word about 
“biological memory.” Well, it will take but 
few sentences to point out Butler’s relation 
to this subject. The fact that he used “ Un- 
conscious Memory” as title for one of his 
books shows the store he set by his notions 
about biological memory—notions that he un- 
doubtedly developed independently, and that 
he believed, at the time he formulated them, 
to be wholly original with him. Butler’s 
theory that heredity and instincts are the re- 
sults of, or are themselves, biological memory, 
was set out in detail in his first biological 
book, “ Life and Habit” (1878). The book 
“Unconscious Memory” (1880) is chiefly de- 
voted to recording his discovery that he had 
been antedated by Ewald Hering, whose ad- 
dress on “Das Gedichtniss als allgemeine 
Funktion der organisirter Substanz,” given 
before a meeting of the Vienna Imperial 
Academy of Sciences on May 30, 1870, he 
translates and prints in full. The book also 
contains a long translation from yon Hart- 
mann, and some discussion of it, to show that 
Hering’s and Butler’s theory of biological 
memory is not at all von Hartmann’s uncon- 
scious control. And it is in this book, too, 
that Butler (Chap. IV.) says his worst about 
Darwin. 
As a matter of fact, Hering was not the 
first to have the conception of an explanation 
of repetitive phenomena in organisms on the 
basis of cell or molecule memory. Jamarck 
and Haeckel had both suggested such an idea. 
In our own country, Cope and Hyatt, not 
earlier, but undoubtedly each originally, ex- 
pressed the essence of such a conception. 
Hyatt indeed coined the word .“ mnemogene- 
sis” for use in connection with his ideas 
about heredity and instinct. But Hering was 
certainly the first to give the conception full 
form, to compose it of details, and to suggest 
a physical basis for it, viz., the reception and 
storing by the body protoplasm of vibrations 
coming from without, so that this protoplasm 
became actually changed in capacity by its 
