6o2 THE WONDER OF LIFE 



the germ-cells are supposed to treasure up some of the 

 results of the organism's experience, as it were, by uncon- 

 scious memory, so that when they come to develop they 

 reproduce in some measure the traits which their parents 

 or their ancestors acquired as the result of experience. 

 The idea is that the germ-cells become stored with the 

 latent ' memories ' of past generations, or less metaphoric- 

 ally that the germ- cells are changed or impressed in a 

 definite and specific way by the organism's experiences. 

 Development is in part the ' recollection ' of these germinally 

 treasured ' memories '. 



Samuel Butler's view was that an inheritance implies 

 a store of memories and that development is akin to recol- 

 lection. A newly hatched chick pecks at once and with 

 good efiect, because certain cells in the chick remember 

 having superintended pecking before. Part of every in- 

 dividual existed before in the parents and the molecules 

 have a memory of previous experiences. 



Let us take as a very interesting illustration E. 

 Bordage's observations on European peach trees trans- 

 ported to Eeunion. As has been noticed in similar cases, 

 they dropped their deciduous habit and became — ^it took 

 some twenty years — evergreen. The individual constitu- 

 tion was altered. But the stiU more interesting point 

 is that when seeds of these pseudo-evergreens were sown 

 in certain mountainous districts with a considerable 

 amount of frost, they produced young peach trees which 

 were also evergreen. European seeds sown in similar 

 places produced ordinary deciduous trees. 



It must not be hastily concluded that an interesting 

 case Uke this compels us to return to the old behef in the 

 transmission of acquired characters — ^in the form that 



