204 INITIATIVE IN EVOLUTION 



Lankester's conception of educability, which he maintains to be 

 the only acquired character the organism inherits, and it may be 

 therefore assumed to be under the iron law of selection. This must 

 be accepted with the respect due to the high authority from which 

 it proceeds. But such a conception, while it removes a false light 

 in certain regions, sheds no light on the pathway of animal evolu- 

 tion, unless modifications be transmitted, and we can now take it 

 that man does not inherit the power to speak which for incalculable 

 ages he has been learning, nor to write, even though in the days of 

 the early Pyramid -builders and the Sumerians in the plains of 

 Chaldea they possessed the power of writing, nor can a musician's 

 child learn to play an instrument without teaching, or indeed man 

 perform any of his arts and crafts by second nature : so, negatively, 

 this knowledge is valuable, and the neo-Lamarckian must proceed 

 on his quest without anything more than educability to aid him — 

 but it will serve. The fact is that we do not inherit habits or associa- 

 tions as such at all, but the neurones of the grey matter in spine 

 and brain which subserve, direct and control them. Though a 

 fresh neurone or two in the brain of an early ungulate deliberating, 

 so to speak, as to the life he shall take up, whether that of oxen 

 or horses, may be trifling in itself as to immediate value to the 

 animal, it may be to him as much a matter of fate to acquire those 

 microscopic cells as it was to the undifferentiated organism that 

 paused before it sealed its fate as plant. Under the free and 

 enlightened government of the integrating nervous system liberty 

 to express itself to an almost unlimited extent, in accordance with 

 progress, is thus open to the hypothetical adventurers. 



When considering such an aspect of the organism as the 

 " choice " between the career of an odd -toed or even-toed ungulate, 

 a cat or dog, a lion or tiger, a gibbon or other of the four anthropoid 

 genera which assuredly was presented to certain groups of primitive 

 ungulates carnivores, felidse or apes, as historical beings, the vision 

 of the process is sore let and hindered by the limiting force of certain 

 expressions which have been sanctioned with the imprimatur of 

 fifty years' high thinking in the realms of high biology. I refer of 

 course to the terms Selection and Evolution which, though they 

 cannot be replaced by better terms, have the power and sometimes 

 have had the effect of impressing on the story of organic existence 

 an aspect of determinism which does not allow, for any purposive 

 action of the individual, the working out of its own salvation, on 

 the part of higher forms at any rate. As among nations self- 

 expression has become of late a powerful force in their development, 

 and indeed of individuals, so it may be argued by analogy that the 



