52 LVCK, OR CUNNING? 



afterwards let the Natural Selection part of the story- 

 go as completely without saying as I do myself, or as 

 Mr. Darwin did during the later years of his life. 

 Writing to Nature, April lo, 1884, he said: "To deny 

 that experience in the course of successive generations is 

 the source of instinct, is not to meet by way of argu- 

 ment the enormous mass of evidence which goes to 

 prove that this is the case!' Here, then, instinct is 

 referred, without reservation, to " experience in suc- 

 cessive generations," and this is nonsense unless ex- 

 plained as Professor Hering and I explain it. Mr. 

 Eomanes' words, in fact, amount to an unqualified 

 acceptance of the chapter " Instinct as Inherited 

 Memory" given in "Life and Habit," of which Mr. 

 Eomanes in March 1884 wrote in terms which it is 

 not necessary to repeat. 



Later on : — 



"That 'practice makes perfect' is a matter, as I 

 have previously said, of daily observation. "Whether 

 we regard a juggler, a pianist, or a billiard-player, 

 a child learning his lesson or an actor his part by 

 frequently repeating it, or a thousand other illus- 

 trations of the same process, we see at once that 

 there is truth in the cynical definition of a man as 

 a ' bundle of habits.' And the same, of course, is true 

 of animals." * 



From this Mr. Eomanes goes on to show "that 

 automatic actions and conscious habits may be in- 

 herited," t and in the course of doing this contends 

 that " instincts may be lost by disuse, and conversely 



* Mental Evolution in Animals, p. 192. + Bnd. p. 195. 



