This is like saying, "It is not true that such and such a picture was
rejected for the Academy, but it is true that it was submitted to the
President and Council of the Royal Academy, with a view to acceptance
at their next forthcoming annual exhibition, and that the President
and Council regretted they were unable through want of space, &c.,
&c." --and as much more as the reader chooses. I shall venture,
therefore, to stick to it that the octogenarian was once a fish, or
if Professor Huxley prefers it, "an organism which must be classified
among fishes."

But if a man was a fish once, he may have been a fish a million times
over, for aught he knows; for he must admit that his conscious
recollection is at fault, and has nothing whatever to do with the
matter, which must be decided, not, as it were, upon his own evidence
as to what deeds he may or may not recollect having executed, but by
the production of his signatures in court, with satisfactory proof
that he has delivered each document as his act and deed.

This made things very much simpler. The processes of embryonic
development, and instinctive actions, might be now seen as
repetitions of the same kind of action by the same individual in
successive generations. It was natural, therefore, that they should
come in the course of time to be done unconsciously, and a
consideration of the most obvious facts of memory removed all further
doubt that habit--which is based on memory--was at the bottom of all
the phenomena of heredity.

I had got to this point about the spring of 1874, and had begun to
write, when I was compelled to go to Canada, and for the next year
and a half did hardly any writing. The first passage in "Life and