2,"6 JOURNAL OF SCIENCE. 



The terror of a horse :it the odor of an unknown wild Least might be 

 accounted for by inherited memory ; but it seemed more reasonable to 

 attribute it to the immediate perception of a maleficent quality. 

 Protective instincts like this were found throughout nature, but were 

 so rudimentary in man, that physically, as compared with beasts and 

 insects, he was the inferior animal. The nearer man approximated to 

 the lower animals in his mode of life and intellectual development, the 

 more powerful these instincts seemed to be ; but as his rational capacity 

 increased, they were ignored and seemed gradually to disappear. Yet 

 they were by no means to be despised, as where they existed, they 

 enabled him to arrive by a short cut at a point, which could otherwise 

 only be attained by great and laborious mental effort. Sometimes a 

 child was found to possess almost in infancy faculties which showed how 

 great the undeveloped possibilities of mankind were in this direction. 

 There were well-attested cases of children knowing neither letters nor 

 figures, — one a negro boy — who had a natural perception of qualities 

 and relations of numbers, and a skill in dealing with them, exceeding 

 that of trained mathematicians. The mental quality that could at once 

 recognise a prime of almost any number of figures at sight, and the 

 power of analysis which could resolve any divisible number into its 

 factors, were not to be attained by the severest training; but this 

 gift was actually possessed by a calculating child. Young Mozart, 

 in early infancy, possessed a similar grasp of the qualities of sound — a 

 p:actical as well as a theoretical perception, for he was able to play any 

 instrument at sight. Hereditary memory would scarcely account for 

 phenomena, like these, which were interesting as showing how im- 

 measurably human instinct, in its higher forms, transcends that of the 

 animal creation. Regarding Sir John Lubbock's celebrated experiments 

 with ants, careful and systematic as they were, and completely as they 

 failed to show anything like intelligent or conceited action, he did not 

 think their results warranted us in rejecting the accumulated testimony 

 of past ages on the subject. 



The President said that Mr. Carlile's illustration of heredity 

 lecalled to his mind that many years before when riding a very quiet 

 horse the animal suddenly leapt aside and began trembling in great fear 

 on seeing a piece of rata vine coiled up and lying in the road exactly as 

 a snake would be coiled. This horse was two generations from an 

 Australian progenitor. It had been said that instinct is " inherited 

 memory" — and although that might seem to explain such facts as the 

 orderly movements and almost automatically-regulated actions of ants 

 and bees, it by no means explained any unusual cleverness or excep- 

 tional genius. For instance, the musical genius of Mozart could hardly 

 be expected to be produced out of thin air, and yet it could certainly 

 not be called "inherited." Reason had little to explain to us why 

 Mozart as a child was a finished musician, and analogies drawn from 

 one order of beings should lie used with great caution if applied to 

 explain difficulties in regard to other kinds of creatures. Experiments 

 had recently been made which show that when insects are subjected to 

 the different bands cf light thrown down by the spectroscope they display 

 different modes of action, lying dormant under one colour, growing 

 intensely excited under another, and so on. It is possible that they 



