EVOLUTION OF INSTINCTIVE BEHAVIOUR 107 
practice,” he says,* “suffice for the explanation of the acquired 
instincts. The occurrence of connate instincts renders a sub- 
sidiary hypothesis necessary. We must suppose that the 
physical changes which the nervous elements undergo can be 
transmitted from father to son. . . . The assumption of the 
inheritance of acquired dispositions or tendencies is inevitable 
if there is to be any continuity of evolution at all. We may 
be in doubt as to the extent of this inheritance; we cannot 
* question the fact itself.” 
Now, the application of the term “instinct,” both to 
acquired and to connate behaviour, seems to prejudge the 
question of their genetic connection. And since we have the 
well-recognized term habits for actions the performance of 
which becomes automatic through frequency of repetition, we 
may substitute this term, or the phrase habitual acts, for the 
“acquired instincts” of Professor Wundt. Modifying, there- 
fore, his statement in accordance with this usage, the fact 
which, he says, we cannot question is that acquired habits are 
inherited as congenital instincts. This opinion has long been 
held: G. H. Lewes regarded instinctive actions as transmitted 
habits from which the intelligence, through which they were 
originally acquired, had lapsed. Darwin believed that such 
inheritance was a factor in the evolution of instinctive be- 
haviour. Romanes distinguished instincts due to this mode of 
origin as “secondary ;” reserving the term “primary” for 
those attributable to natural selection, and describing those in 
which both factors co-operate as “ instincts of blended origin.” 
The late Professor Himer, of Tiibingen, going further than 
either Darwin or Romanes, reverted almost entirely to what we 
may term the Lamarckian interpretation. “I describe as 
automatic actions,” he says,t “those which, originally per- 
formed consciously and voluntarily, in consequence of frequent 
practice come to be performed unconsciously and involun- 
tarily. . . . Such acquired automatic actions can be inherited. 
Instinct is inherited faculty, especially is inherited habit.” In 
* “Lectures on Human and Animal Psychology,” p. 405. 
+ “ Organic Evolution,” pp. 223, 263, 258, 279, 276, 298. 
