Darwin, and in that of the designer of Jesse tree windows, but it
had kindled no fire; it now turns out that Canon Kingsley had once
called instinct inherited memory, {40a} but the idea, if born alive
at all, died on the page on which it saw light: Professor Ray
Lankester, again called attention to Professor Hering's address
(Nature, July 13, 1876), but no discussion followed, and the matter
dropped without having produced visible effect. As for offspring
remembering in any legitimate sense of the words what it had done,
and what had happened to it, before it was born, no such notion was
understood to have been gravely mooted till very recently. I doubt
whether Mr. Spencer and Mr. Romanes would accept this even now, when
it is put thus undisguisedly; but this is what Professor Hering and
I mean, and it is the only thing that should be meant, by those who
speak of instinct as inherited memory. Mr Spencer cannot maintain
that these two startling novelties went without saying "by
implication" from the use of such expressions as "accumulated
experiences" or "experience of the race."



CHAPTER III--MR. HERBERT SPENCER (continued)



Whether they ought to have gone or not, they did not go.

When "Life and Habit" was first published no one considered Mr.
Spencer to be maintaining the phenomena of heredity to be in reality
phenomena of memory. When, for example, Professor Ray Lankester
first called attention to Professor Hering's address, he did not