Chapter IV* 
Mr. Romanes’ “ Mental Evolution in Animals” 
ITHOUT raising the unprofitable question how Mr. 
Romanes, in spite of the indifference with which he 
treated the theory of Inherited Memory in 1881, came, in 
1883, to be sufficiently imbued with a sense of its impor- 
tance, IJ still cannot afford to dispense with the weight 
of his authority, and in this chapter will show how closely 
he not infrequently approaches the Heringian position. 
Thus, he says that the analogies between the memory 
with which we are familiar in daily life and hereditary: 
memory “are so numerous and precise” as to justify 
us in considering them to be of essentially the same kind. f 
Again, he says that although the memory of milk shown 
by new-born infants is “ at all events in large part heredi- 
tary, it is none the less memory ” of a certain kind.t+ 
Two lines lower down he writes of “ hereditary memory 
or instinct,” thereby implying that instinct is “‘ hereditary 
memory.” ‘“ It makes no essential difference,” he says, 
“whether the past sensation was actually experienced by 
the individual itself, or bequeathed it, so to speak, by its 
ancestors. For it makes no essential difference whether 
the nervous changes . . . were occasioned during the life- 
* This chapteris taken almost entirely from my book, ‘‘ Selections, 
&c., and Remarks on Romanes’ ‘ Mental Evolution in Animals.’ ” 
Trtibner, 1884. [Now out of print.] 
¢ “Mental Evolution in Animals,” p. 113. Kegan Paul, Nov., 
1883. 
3 Ibid. p. 115. § Ibid. p. 116, 
52 
