i88i.] 
Analyses of Books* 421 
which falsify the date of the events remembered.” We are in 
some doubt whether the date of an event should "not, like its 
locality, and like the adfcors, sufferers, or other participators in 
the events, be simply included under the “ manner of happening.” 
However this may be, we shall find persons who will readily ad- 
mit that they have forgotten the whole or a part of some occur* 
rence, but who will yet maintain that so much of it as they do 
recoiled! must be an accurate transcript of the reality. Careful 
self-examination will, however, convince any of us that such is 
by no means the fadt. As the author points out, a disputant will 
sometimes exclaim “ I either witnessed the occurrence or else I 
dreamt it.” A careful man may have in his memory matter 
which he does not like to mention, because he is not sure whether 
it is a portion of his personal experience, a relic of a dream, or 
something which he has heard or read. 
Concerning one class of the spedtra of memory — to wit, the 
dim reeolledtions of a former life — the author makes an interest- 
ing suggestion. It is well known that the occasional occurrence 
of such shadowy reminiscences has been urged in favour of the 
dodtrine of metamorphosis.* But says Mr. Sully, “ May it not 
happen that, by the law of hereditary transmission which is now 
being applied to mental as well as bodily phenomena, ancestral 
experiences will now and then refledt themselves in our mental 
life, and so give rise to apparently personal reeolledtions ? ” As 
an instance we quote the following letter, communicated to us by 
a friend whose name we are not at liberty to bring forward : — 
“ In my fourteenth year,” he writes, “ my father judged that a 
knowledge of the Spanish language would be useful to me in 
after life. At the very first lesson the words and the sounds 
seemed to me strangely familiar, as if at some time I had been 
accustomed to hear and to use them. I had experienced nothing 
at all similar with the French and German languages, which I 
had begun to learn about a year before, and which had always 
seemed to me radically strange. There was nothing to account 
for this odd fadt. No Spaniard, or person who had visited Spain, 
had come in my way. Being given to prying, I sought to ascer- 
tain whether my early infancy had been partly spent in Spain, 
but I soon got convincing evidence that I could never have been 
20 miles away from the place where I was then living. I dis- 
missed the question as beyond my reach; but about twenty years 
afterwards I learnt, quite accidentally, that my mother’s father 
had passed his childhood in the neighbourhood of Malaga, and 
that the Spanish was his first language.” This seems to us a 
fair instance of hereditary reminiscence. 
The author observes that when old friends meet and talk over 
bye-gone days, there is “ a gradual re-instatement of seemingly 
lost experiences which often partakes of a semi-voluntary process 
* See H. G. Duvergier, in the Vi&orian Review, March 1, 1880. 
