But then to have said this would have made it too plain that Mr. Romanes was following some one else. Mr. Romanes should remember that no one would mind how much he took if he would only take it well. But this is what those who take without due acknowledgment never do.
In Mr. Darwin’s case it is hardly possible to exaggerate the waste of time, money, and trouble that has been caused by his not having been content to appear as descending with modification like other people from those who went before him. It will take years to get
the evolution theory out of the mess in which Mr. Darwin has left it. He was heir to a discredited truth; he left behind him an accredited fallacy. Mr. Romanes, if he is not stopped in time, will get the theory connecting heredity and memory into just such another muddle as Mr. Darwin has got Evolution, for surely the writer who can talk about “heredity being able to work up the faculty of homing into the instinct of migration,” [242a] or of “the principle of (natural) selection combining with that of lapsing intelligence to the formation of a joint result,” [242b] is little likely to depart from the usual methods of scientific procedure with advantage either to himself or any one else. Fortunately Mr. Romanes is not Mr. Darwin, and though he has certainly got Mr. Darwin’s mantle, and got it very much too, it will not on Mr. Romanes’ shoulders hide a good deal that people were not going to observe too closely while Mr. Darwin wore it.
REMARKS ON MR. ROMANES’ MENTAL EVOLUTION IN ANIMALS—(concluded).
I gather that in the end the late Mr. Darwin himself admitted the soundness of the view which the reader will have found insisted upon in the extracts from my earlier books given in this volume. Mr. Romanes quotes a letter written by Mr. Darwin in the last year of his life, in which he speaks of an intelligent action gradually becoming “instinctive, i.e., memory transmitted from one generation to another.” [243a]
Briefly, the stages of Mr. Darwin’s opinion upon the subject of hereditary memory are as follows:—
1859. “It would be the most serious error to suppose that the greater number of instincts have been acquired by habit in one generation and transmitted by inheritance to succeeding generations.” [243b] And this more especially applies to the instincts of many ants.
1876. “It would be a serious error to suppose” &c., as before. [243c]
1881. “We should remember what a mass of inherited knowledge is crowded into the minute brain of a worker ant.” [243d]
1881 or 1882. Speaking of a given habitual action