MR. HERBERT SPENCER. 35 



once called instinct inherited memory,* but the idea, 

 if born alive at all, died on the page on which it saw- 

 light : Professor Eay Lankester, again, called attention 

 to Professor Hering's address {Nature, July 13, 1876), 

 but no discussion followed, and the matter dropped 

 without having produced visible effect. As for offspring 

 remembering in any legitimate sense of the words 

 what it had done, and what had happened to it, be- 

 fore it was born, no such notion was understood to 

 have been gravely mooted till very recently. I doubt 

 whether Mr. Spencer and Mr. Eomanes would accept 

 this even now, when it is put thus undisguisedly ; but 

 this is what Professor Hering and I mean, and it is 

 the only thing that should be meant, by those who 

 speak of instinct as inherited memory. Mr. Spencer 

 cannot maintain that these two startling novelties 

 went without saying "by implication" from the use 

 of such expressions as "accumulated experiences" or 

 " experience of the race." 



* I have given the passage in full on p. 254a of my " Selections, &o." 

 I observe that Canon Kingsley felt exactly the same difficulty that I 

 had felt myself, and saw also how alone it could be met. He makes 

 the wood-wren say, "Something told him his mother had done it 

 before him, and he was flesh of her flesh, life of her life, and had 

 inherited her instinct (as we call hereditary memory, to avoid the 

 trouble of finding out what it is and how it comes)." — Fraser, June 1867. 

 Canon Kingsley felt he must insist on the continued personality of the 

 two generations before he could talk about inherited memory. On 

 the other hand, though he does indeed speak of this as almost a 

 synonym for instinct, he seems not to have realised how right lie was, 

 and implies that we should find some fuller and more satisfactory 

 explanation behind this, only that we are too lazy to look for it. 



