understand Mr. Spencer to be intending this. "Professor Hering," he
wrote (Nature, July 13, 1876), "helps us to a comprehensive view of
the nature of heredity and adaptation, by giving us the word
'memory,' conscious or unconscious, for the continuity of Mr.
Spencer's polar forces or polarities of physiological units." He
evidently found the prominence given to memory a help to him which
he had not derived from reading Mr. Spencer's works.

When, again, he attacked me in the Athenaeum (March 29, 1884), he
spoke of my "tardy recognition" of the fact that Professor Hering
had preceded me "in treating all manifestations of heredity as a
form of memory." Professor Lankester's words could have no force if
he held that any other writer, and much less so well known a writer
as Mr. Spencer, had preceded me in putting forward the theory in
question.

When Mr. Romanes reviewed "Unconscious Memory" in Nature (January
27, 1881) the notion of a "race-memory," to use his own words, was
still so new to him that he declared it "simply absurd" to suppose
that it could "possibly be fraught with any benefit to science," and
with him too it was Professor Hering who had anticipated me in the
matter, not Mr. Spencer.

In his "Mental Evolution in Animals" (p. 296) he said that Canon
Kingsley, writing in 1867, was the first to advance the theory that
instinct is inherited memory; he could not have said this if Mr.
Spencer had been understood to have been upholding this view for the
last thirty years.

Mr. A. R. Wallace reviewed "Life and Habit" in Nature (March 27,