THE AMERICAN NATURALIST [Vol. L 



The second class consists of biologists and utilizers of biological 

 material whose keenness of thought is below the average. This 

 school introduces use inheritance into the conception of evolution 

 because it has failed to comprehend adequately the essential prob- 

 lems of evolution, and approaches them substantially in the atti- 

 tude of the layman. 



The latter class is therefore merely unscientific and popular in 

 its thought processes; the former, having exhausted scientific 

 means and found them inadequate, returns, more or less frankly 

 in despair, to current folk opinion. The problem accord i ugly is 

 to discover the basis of the deeply rooted popular notion that is 

 involved in both cases. 



While never formulated into a definite working principle until 

 Lamarck, because of the world's lack of specific scientific interest 

 in organic phenomena, the principle of use inheritance has never- 

 theless been tacitly assumed by civilized nations of all periods, 

 and is taken as self-evident even by savages. It must therefore 

 rest on a large mass of common experience interpreted by an 

 elementary process of thought. Such an elementary process — in 

 fact the only elementary process of wide scope— is analogy. 



The question then becomes what may be the basis — real enough 

 though unscientifically employed — for the analogizing that has 

 resulted in the conviction that use heredity exists. There must 

 evidently be a broad group of phenomena in human experience 

 that bear some resemblance to the hereditary transmission of the 

 acquired. 



These phenomena are the exceedingly common ones of social 

 inheritance or cultural transmission and growth. "We do "in- 

 herit" a name, or property, or knowledge of a language, or the 

 practice of an art, or belief in a particular form of religion. 

 Biologically such "inheritance" is of course absolutely distinct 

 from "heredity" because the mechanism of transmission is dif- 

 ferent. The source of social inheritance is not restricted to 

 parents and actual ancestors in the line of descent, but embraces 

 a multitude of individuals, consanguineous and unrelated, dead, 

 living, and sometimes even junior to the inheritors; in other 

 words, the totality of the social environment, past and present, 

 of an individual. We can and do "inherit" property from an 

 uncle, our "mother tongue" from a nurse, the arithmetic evolved 

 by past ages from a schoolmaster, our dogmas and philosophy 

 from a prophet, our political and moral beliefs from the whole 

 circumambient public opinion. 



