ing which the recollection may be
supposed still imperfect, will tend to ensure uniformity, for it will be
one of the elements of sameness in the agents--they both acting by the
light of experience and memory.

During the embryonic stages and in childhood we are almost entirely under
the guidance of a practised and powerful memory of circumstances which
have been often repeated, not only in detail and piecemeal, but as a
whole, and under many slightly varying conditions; thus the performance
has become well averaged and matured in its arrangements, so as to meet
all ordinary emergencies. We therefore act with great unconsciousness
and vary our performances little. Babies are much more alike than
persons of middle age.

Up to the average age at which our ancestors have had children during
many generations, we are still guided in great measure by memory; but the
variations in external circumstances begin to make themselves perceptible
in our characters. In middle life we live more and more continually upon
the piecing together of details of memory drawn from our personal
experience, that is to say, upon the memory of our own antecedents; and
this resembles the kind of memory we hypothetically attached to cream a
little time ago. It is not surprising, then, that a son who has
inherited his father's tastes and constitution, and who lives much as his
father had done, should make the same mistakes as his father did when he
reaches his father's age--we will say of seventy--though he cannot
possibly remember his father's having made the mistakes. It were to be
wished we could, for then we might know better how to avoid gout, cancer,
or what not. And it is to be noticed that the developments of old age
are generally things we should be glad enough to avoid if we knew how to
do so.

CONCLUSION. (CHAPTER XIII. OF UNCONSCIOUS MEMORY.)

If we observed the resemblance between successive generations to be as
close as that between distilled water and distilled water through all
time, and if we observed that perfect unchangeableness in the action of
living beings which we see in what we call chemical and mechanical
combinations, we might indeed suspect that memory had as little place
among the causes of their action as it can have in anything, and that
each repetition, whether of a habit or the practice of art, or of an
embryonic process in successive generations, was as original as the
"Origin of Species" itself, for a