MR. HERBERT SPENCER. 47 



not heredity, or iaheritance, but " survival of the 

 fittest." 



Of course we know that Mr. Spencer does not 

 believe this; of course, also, all who are fairly well 

 up in the history of the development theory will see 

 why Mr. Spencer has attempted to draw this distinc- 

 tion between the " factors " of the development of the 

 higher and lower forms of life ; but no matter how or 

 why Mr. Spencer has been led to say what he has, 

 he has no business to have said it. What can we 

 think of a writer who, after so many years of writing 

 upon his subject, in a passage in which he should 

 make his meaning doubly clear, inasmuch as he is 

 claiming ground taken by other writers, declares 

 that though hereditary use and disuse, or, to use his 

 own words, " the inheritance of functionally produced 

 modifications," is indeed very important in connec- 

 tion with the development of the higher forms of 

 life, yet heredity itself has little or nothing to do 

 with that of the lower? Variations, whether pro- 

 duced functionally or not, can only be perpetuated 

 and accumulated because they can be inherited; — 

 and this applies just as much to the lower as to the 

 higher forms of life; the question which Professor 

 Hering and I have tried to answer is, " How comes it 

 that anything can be inherited at all ? In virtue of 

 what power is it that offspring can repeat and improve 

 upon the performances of their parents ? " Our answer 

 was, " Because in a very valid sense, though not per- 

 haps in the one most usually understood, there is con- 

 tinued personality and an abiding memory between 



