MR. HERBERT SPENCER. 37 



no force if he held that any other writer, and much 

 less so well known a writer as Mr. Spencer, had pre- 

 ceded me in putting forward the theory in question. 



When Mr. Eomanes reviewed " Unconscious 

 Memory ''in Nature (January 27, 1881) the notion 

 of a "race-memory," to use his own words, was still so 

 new to him that he declared it " simply absurd " to 

 suppose 'that it could " possibly be fraught with any 

 benefit to science," and with him too it was Professor 

 Hering who had anticipated me in the matter, not Mr. 

 Spencer. 



In his " Mental Evolution in Animals '' (p. 296) he 

 said that Canon Kingsley, writing in 1867, was the 

 first to advance the theory that instinct is inherited 

 memory ; he could not have said this if Mr. Spencer 

 had been understood to have been upholding this view 

 for the last thirty years. 



Mr. A. E, Wallace reviewed " Life and Habit " in 

 Nature (K&icla. 27, 1879), but he did not find the line 

 I had taken a familiar one, as he surely must have 

 done if it had followed easily by implication from Mr. 

 Spencer's works. He called it " an ingenious and 

 paradoxical explanation " which was evidently new to 

 him. He concluded by saying that it "might yet 

 afford a clue to some of the deepest mysteries of the 

 organic world." 



Professor Mivart, when he reviewed my books on 

 Evolution in the American Catholic Quarterly Review 

 (July 1 881), said, "Mr. Butler is not only perfectly 

 logical and consistent in the startling consequences he 

 deduces from his principles, but,'' &c. Professor Mivart 



