58 LUCK, OR CUNNING? 



metaphor, to hunt with the hounds and run -with 

 the hare at one and the same time. 



I remember saying that if the late Mr. Darwin " had 

 told us what the earlier evolutionists said, why they 

 said it, wherein he differed from them, and in what 

 way he proposed to set them straight, he would have 

 taken a course at once more agreeable with usual 

 practice, and more likely to remove misconception from 

 his own mind and from those of his readers." * This I 

 have no doubt was one of the passages which made 

 Mr. Eomanes so angry with me. I can find no better 

 words to apply to Mr. Eomanes himself. He knows 

 perfectly well what others have written about the con- 

 nection between heredity and memory, and he knows 

 no less well that so far as he is intelligible at all he is 

 taking the same view that they have taken. If he 

 had begun by saying what they had said, and had then 

 improved on it, I for one should have been only too 

 glad to be improved upon. 



Mr. Eomanes has spoiled his book just because this 

 plain old-fashioned method of procedure was not good 

 enough for him. One-half the obscurity which makes 

 his meaning so hard to apprehend is due to exactly 

 the same cause as that which has ruined so much of 

 the late Mr. Darwin's work — I mean to a desire to 

 appear to be differing altogether from others with 

 whom he knew himself after all to be in substantial 

 agreement. He adopts, but (probably quite uncon- 

 sciously) in his anxiety to avoid appearing to adopt, 

 he obscures what he is adopting. 



* Evolution, Old and New, pp. 357, 358. 



