hy of any reference to Life and
Habit, Evolution, Old and New, and Unconscious Memory--works in which, if
I may venture to say so, the theory connecting the phenomena of heredity
with memory has been not only "suggested," but so far established that
even Mr. Romanes has been led to think the matter over independently and
to arrive at the same general conclusion as myself.

Curiously enough, Mr. Grant Allen too has come to much the same
conclusions as myself, after having attacked me, though not so fiercely,
as Mr. Romanes has done. In 1879 he said in the _Examiner_ (May 17) that
the teleological view put forward in Evolution, Old and New, was "just
the sort of mystical nonsense from which" he "had hoped Mr. Darwin had
for ever saved us." And so in the _Academy_ on the same day he said that
no "one-sided argument" (referring to Evolution, Old and New) could ever
deprive Mr. Darwin of the "place which he had eternally won in the
history of human thought by his magnificent achievement."

A few years, and Mr. Allen entertains a very different opinion of Mr.
Darwin's magnificent achievement.

"There are only two conceivable ways," he writes, "in which any increment
of brain power can ever have arisen in any individual. The one is the
Darwinian way, by 'spontaneous variation,' that is to say by variation
due to minute physical circumstances affecting the individual in the
germ. The other is the Spencerian way, by functional increment, that is
to say by the effect of increased use and constant exposure to varying
circumstances during conscious life." {250}

Mr. Allen must know very well, or if he does not he has no excuse at any
rate for not knowing, that the theory according to which increase of
brain power or any other bodily or mental power is due to use, is no more
Mr. Spencer's than the theory of gravitation is, except in so far as that
Mr. Spencer has adopted it. It is the theory which every one except Mr.
Allen associates with Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, but more especially
(and on the whole I suppose justly) with Lamarck.

"I venture to think," continues Mr. Allen, "that the first way [Mr.
Darwin's], if we look it clearly in the face, will be seen to be
_practically unthinkable_; and that we have therefore no alternative but
to accept the second."

These writers go round so quickly and so completely that there is no
keeping pace with them. "As to Materialism," he writes presently,
"surely it is more profoun