Mr. Herbert Spencer 43 
“ 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 under- 
stood to have been upholding this view for the last thirty 
years. 
Mr. A. R. Wallace reviewed “‘ Life and Habit” in 
Nature (March 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 
1881), said, ‘‘ Mr Butler is not only perfectly logical and 
consistent in the startling consequences he deduces from 
his principles, but,” &c. Professor Mivart could not have 
found my consequences startling if they had already been 
insisted upon for many years by one of the best-known 
writers of the day. 
The reviewer of ‘“‘ Evolution Old and New” in the 
Saturday Review (March 31, 1879), of whom all I can venture 
to say is that he or she is a person whose name carries 
weight in matters connected with biology, though he 
(for brevity) was in the humour for seeing everything 
objectionable in me that could be seen, still saw no Mr. 
Spencer in me. He said—‘‘ Mr Butler’s own particular 
contribution to the terminology of Evolution is the phrase 
two or three times repeated with some emphasis” (I 
repeated it not two or three times only, but whenever and 
wherever I could venture to do so without wearying the 
