Likeness of Ontogeny and Memory 317 
on the part of organized matter, of processes in which 
it already took part at another time, even if only as 
a germ in the ovary, and which now at an opportune 
moment it recalls exactly while reacting to the same or 
similar stimuli in a way similar to that formerly followed 
by that organism of which it was once a part, and 
whose vicissitudes it then had shared? If the parent 
organism by long custom or repeated action has changed 
somewhat in nature in such a way that the germinal 
cellule within it has also been affected however 
feebly it may be, and if this latter commences a 
new existence growing and developing into a new being 
of which the different parts are yet only itself and flesh 
of its flesh; and if in thus developing it reproduces that 
experience which it had already shared at another time 
as part of a great whole; this is indeed just as astonishing 
as when the memory of his earliest childhood suddenly 
comes back to the old man, but it is no more astonishing. 
And whether it is still the same organized substance 
which reproduces a process already once experienced, 
or whether it is only a descendant, a portion of itself, 
which in the interval has grown and become large, this 
is manifestly a difference of degree only and not of 
essence.” 231 
We shall not repeat here the objections which have 
been advanced against the similar affirmations of Orr 
231Rwald Hering: Uber das Gedachtnis als eine allgemeine 
Funktion der organisierten Materie. Wien, Gerold, 1876. P. 16—17. 
Hering’s thesis has recently been taken up again by Richard Semon 
and been treated more thoroughly and completely in his work: Die 
Mneme als erhaltendes Prinzip im Wechsel des organischen Gesche- 
hens. Leipzig, Engelmann, 1904. (See Eugenio Rignano: Une 
nouvelle théorie mnémonique du développement. Revue Philoso- 
phique. Paris, Alcan, November 1906. No. 11.) 
