“I. The first mode of origin consists in natural selection or survival of the fittest, continuously preserving actions, &c. &c.
“II. The second mode of origin is as follows:—By the effects of habit in successive generations, actions which were originally intelligent become as it were stereotyped into permanent instincts. Just as in the lifetime of the individual adjustive actions which were originally intelligent may by frequent repetition become automatic, so in the lifetime of species actions originally intelligent may by frequent repetition and heredity so write their effects on the nervous system that the latter is prepared, even before individual experience, to perform adjustive actions mechanically which in previous generations were performed intelligently. This mode of origin of instincts has been appropriately called (by Lewes—see “Problems of Life and Mind” [54a]) the ‘lapsing of intelligence.’” [54b]
I may say in passing that in spite of the great stress laid by Mr. Romanes both in his “Mental Evolution in Animals” and in his letters to the Athenæum in March 1884, on Natural Selection as an originator and developer of instinct, he very soon afterwards let the Natural Selection part of the story go as completely without saying as I do myself, or as Mr. Darwin did during the later years of his life. Writing to Nature, April 10, 1884, he said: “To deny that experience in the course of successive generations is the source of instinct, is not to meet by way of argument the enormous mass of evidence which goes to prove that this is the case.” Here, then, instinct is referred, without reservation, to “experience in successive generations,” and this is nonsense unless explained as Professor Hering and I explain it. Mr. Romanes’ words, in fact, amount to an unqualified acceptance of the chapter “Instinct as Inherited Memory” given in “Life and Habit,” of which Mr. Romanes in March 1884 wrote in terms which it is not necessary to repeat.
Later on:—
“That ‘practice makes perfect’ is a matter, as I have previously said, of daily observation. Whether we regard a juggler, a pianist, or a billiard-player, a child learning his lesson or an actor his part by frequently repeating it, or a thousand other illustrations of the same process, we see at once that there is truth in the cynical definition of a man as a ‘bundle of habits.’ And the same, of course, is true of animals.” [55a]
From this Mr. Romanes goes on to show “that automatic actions and conscious habits may be inherited,” [55b] and in the course of doing this contends that “instincts may be lost by disuse, and conversely that they may be acquired as instincts by the hereditary transmission of ancestral experience.”
On another page Mr. Romanes says:—
“Let us now turn to the second of these two assumptions, viz., that some at least among migratory birds must possess, by inheritance alone, a very precise knowledge of the particular direction to be pursued. It is without question an astonishing fact that a young cuckoo should be prompted to leave its foster parents at a particular season of the year, and without any guide to show the course previously taken by its own parents, but this is a fact which must be met by any theory of instinct which aims at being complete. Now upon our own theory it can only be met by taking it to be due to inherited memory.”
A little lower Mr. Romanes says: “Of what kind, then, is the inherited memory on which the young cuckoo (if not also other migratory birds) depends? We can only answer, of the same kind, whatever this may be, as that upon which the old bird depends.” [55c]
I have given above most of the more marked passages which I have been able to find in Mr. Romanes’ book which attribute instinct to memory, and which admit that there is no fundamental difference between the kind of memory with which we are all familiar and hereditary memory as transmitted from one generation to another.