‘* Mental Evolution in Animals” 59 
enough, if there had been nothing but the reader’s comfort 
to be considered. Unfortunately that seems to have been 
by no means the only thing of which Mr. Romanes was 
thinking, or why, after implying and even saying over and 
over again that instinct is inherited habit due to inherited 
memory, should he turn sharply round on p. 297 and praise 
Mr. Darwin for trying to snuff out “‘ the well-known doctrine 
of inherited habit as advanced by Lamarck’ ?. The answer 
is not far toseek. It is because Mr. Romanes did not merely 
want to tell us all about instinct, but wanted also, if I may 
use a homely 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 pro- 
posed 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. Romanes so angry with me. 
I can find no better words to apply to Mr. Romanes him- 
self. He knows perfectly well what others have written 
about the connection 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. Romanes 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 alto- 
gether from others with whom he knew himself after all 
* “ Evolution Old and New,” pp. 357; 358. 
