40 Luck, or Cunning ? 
clear, even now that Professor Hering and others have 
thrown light upon them. If, indeed, they had been clear 
Mr. Spencer would probably have seen what they necesi- 
tated, and found the way of meeting the difficulties of the 
case which occurred to Professor Hering and myself. Till 
we wrote, very few writers had even suggested this. The 
idea that offspring was only “an elongation or branch 
proceeding from its parents ” had scintillated in the ingeni- 
ous brain of Dr. Erasmus Darwin, and in that of the 
designer of Jesse tree windows, but it had kindled no fire ; 
it now turns out that Canon Kingsley had once called 
instinct inherited memory,* but the idea, if born alive at all, 
died on the page on which it saw light: Professor Ray 
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, before it was born, no such notion was understood to 
have been gravely mooted till very recently. I doubt 
whether Mr. Spencer and Mr. Romanes 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 
* I have given the passage in full on p. 254a of my “‘ Selections,” 
&c. [Nowoutofprint.] 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).”—Frasery, 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 he 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. 
