_," he says,
"remains." Yes, but not for ever. When Professor Huxley can find a city
that will last for ever, he may wonder that a crayfish does not last for
ever.

I have already here and elsewhere said all that I can yet bring forward
in support of Professor Hering's theory; it now remains for me to meet
the most troublesome objection to it that I have been able to think of--an
objection which I had before me when I wrote Life and Habit, but which
then as now I believe to be unsound. Seeing, however, that a plausible
case can be made out for it, I will state it and refute it here. When I
say refute it, I do not mean that I shall have done with it--for it is
plain that it opens up a vaster question in the relations between the so-
called organic and inorganic worlds--but that I will refute the
supposition that it any way militates against Professor Hering's theory.

"Why," it may be asked, "should we go out of our way to invent
unconscious memory--the existence of which must at the best remain an
inference {184}--when the observed fact that like antecedents are
invariably followed by like consequents should be sufficient for our
purpose? Why should the fact that a given kind of chrysalis in a given
condition will always become a butterfly within a certain time be
connected with memory when it is not pretended that memory has anything
to do with the invariableness with which oxygen and hydrogen when mixed
in certain proportions make water?"

We assume confidently that if a drop of water were decomposed into its
component parts, and if these were brought together again, and again
decomposed and again brought together any number of times over, the
results would be invariably the same, whether decomposition or
combination, yet no one will refer the invariableness of the action
during each repetition, to recollection by the gaseous molecules of the
course taken when the process was last repeated. On the contrary, we are
assured that molecules in some distant part of the world which had never
entered into such and such a known combination themselves, nor held
concert with other molecules that had been so combined, and which,
therefore, could have had no experience and no memory, would none the
less act upon one another in that one way in which other like
combinations of atoms have acted under like circumstances, as readily as
though they had been combined and separated and recombined again a
hundred or a hundred tho