Lamarck"? The answer is not far to seek. It is because Mr. Romanes
did not merely want to tell us all about instinct, but wanted also,
if I may use a homely metaphor, to hunt with the hounds and run with
the hare at one and the same time.

I remember saying that if the late Mr. Darwin "had told us what the
earlier evolutionists said, why they said it, wherein he differed
from them, and in what way he proposed to set them straight, he
would have taken a course at once more agreeable with usual
practice, and more likely to remove misconception from his own mind
and from those of his readers." {59a} This I have no doubt was one
of the passages which made Mr. Romanes so angry with me. I can find
no better words to apply to Mr. Romanes himself. He knows perfectly
well what others have written about the connection between heredity
and memory, and he knows no less well that so far as he is
intelligible at all he is taking the same view that they have taken.
If he had begun by saying what they had said, and had then improved
on it, I for one should have been only too glad to be improved upon.

Mr. Romanes has spoiled his book just because this plain old-
fashioned method of procedure was not good enough for him. One-half
the obscurity which makes his meaning so hard to apprehend is due to
exactly the same cause as that which has ruined so much of the late
Mr. Darwin's work--I mean to a desire to appear to be differing
altogether from others with whom he knew himself after all to be in
substantial agreement. He adopts, but (probably quite
unconsciously) in his anxiety to avoid appearing to adopt, he
obscures what he is adopting.

Here, for example, is Mr. Romanes' definition of instinct:-