the feature of inheritance which is the one mainly distinguishing
instinctive from so-called intelligent actions, and shows the manner
in which these last pass into the first, that is to say, by way of
memory and habitual repetition; finally it points the fact that the
new generation is not to be looked upon as a new thing, but (as Dr.
Erasmus Darwin long since said {61a}) as "a branch or elongation" of
the one immediately preceding it.

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," {61b} or of "the principle of
(natural) selection combining with that of lapsing intelligence to
the formation of a joint result," {61c} 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.

I ought to say that the late Mr. Darwin appears himself eventually
to have admitted the soundness of the theory connecting heredity and