Luck or Cunning as the Main Means of Organic Modification | Page 3

it is plain, therefore, that if posterity is to be pleased, it can only be at the cost of repelling some present readers. Unwilling as I am to do this, I still hold it the lesser of two evils; I will be as brief, however, as the interests of the opinions I am supporting will allow.
In "Life and Habit" I contended that heredity was a mode of memory. I endeavoured to show that all hereditary traits, whether of mind or body, are inherited in virtue of, and as a manifestation of, the same power whereby we are able to remember intelligently what we did half an hour, yesterday, or a twelvemonth since, and this in no figurative but in a perfectly real sense. If life be compared to an equation of a hundred unknown quantities, I followed Professor Hering of Prague in reducing it to one of ninety-nine only, by showing two of the supposed unknown quantities to be so closely allied that they should count as one. I maintained that instinct was inherited memory, and this without admitting more exceptions and qualifying clauses than arise, as it were, by way of harmonics from every proposition, and must be neglected if thought and language are to be possible.
I showed that if the view for which I was contending was taken, many facts which, though familiar, were still without explanation or connection with our other ideas, would remain no longer isolated, but be seen at once as joined with the mainland of our most assured convictions. Among the things thus brought more comfortably home to us was the principle underlying longevity. It became apparent why some living beings should live longer than others, and how any race must be treated whose longevity it is desired to increase. Hitherto we had known that an elephant was a long-lived animal and a fly short-lived, but we could give no reason why the one should live longer than the other; that is to say, it did not follow in immediate coherence with, or as intimately associated with, any familiar principle that an animal which is late in the full development of its reproductive system will tend to live longer than one which reproduces early. If the theory of "Life and Habit" be admitted, the fact of a slow-growing animal being in general longer lived than a quick developer is seen to be connected with, and to follow as a matter of course from, the fact of our being able to remember anything at all, and all the well-known traits of memory, as observed where we can best take note of them, are perceived to be reproduced with singular fidelity in the development of an animal from its embryonic stages to maturity.
Take this view, and the very general sterility of hybrids from being a CRUX of the theory of descent becomes a stronghold of defence. It appears as part of the same story as the benefit derived from judicious, and the mischief from injudicious, crossing; and this, in its turn, is seen as part of the same story, as the good we get from change of air and scene when we are overworked. I will not amplify; but reversion to long-lost, or feral, characteristics, the phenomena of old age, the fact of the reproductive system being generally the last to arrive at maturity--few further developments occurring in any organism after this has been attained--the sterility of many animals in confinement, the development in both males and females under certain circumstances of the characteristics of the opposite sex, the latency of memory, the unconsciousness with which we grow, and indeed perform all familiar actions, these points, though hitherto, most of them, so apparently inexplicable that no one even attempted to explain them, became at once intelligible, if the contentions of "Life and Habit" were admitted.
Before I had finished writing this book I fell in with Professor Mivart's "Genesis of Species," and for the first time understood the distinction between the Lamarckian and Charles-Darwinian systems of evolution. This had not, so far as I then knew, been as yet made clear to us by any of our more prominent writers upon the subject of descent with modification; the distinction was unknown to the general public, and indeed is only now beginning to be widely understood. While reading Mr. Mivart's book, however, I became aware that I was being faced by two facts, each incontrovertible, but each, if its leading exponents were to be trusted, incompatible with the other.
On the one hand there was descent; we could not read Mr. Darwin's books and doubt that all, both animals and plants, were descended from a common source. On the other, there was design; we could not read Paley and refuse to admit that design, intelligence, adaptation of means to