wrote "Life and Habit" it was not understood to form it. If it had
been, I should not have found it necessary to come before the public this
fourth time during the last seven years to insist upon it. Of course the
theory is not new--it was in the air and bound to come; but when it came,
it came through Professor Hering of Prague, and not through those who,
great as are the services they have rendered, still did not render this
particular one of making memory the keystone of their system. Mr.
Romanes now says: "Why, of course, that's what they were meaning all the
time." Perhaps they were, but they did not say so, and
others--conspicuously Mr. Romanes himself--did not understand them to be
meaning what he now discovers that they meant. When Mr. Romanes attacked
me in _Nature_, January 27, 1881, he said I had "been anticipated by
Professor Hering," but he evidently did not understand that any one else
had anticipated me; and far from holding, as he now does, that "the
theory in question forms the backbone of all the previous" writers on
instinct, and "is by all of them elaborately stated as clearly as any
theory can be stated in words," he said (in a passage already quoted)
that it was "interesting, if advanced merely as an illustration, but to
imagine that it maintains any truth of profound significance, or that it
can possibly be fraught with any benefit to science, is absurd."
Considering how recently Mr. Romanes wrote the words just quoted, he has
soon forgotten them.

I do not, as I have said already, and never did, claim to have originated
the theory I put forward in "Life and Habit." I thought it out
independently, but I knew it must have occurred to many, and had probably
been worked out by many, before myself. My claim is to have brought it
perhaps into fuller light, and to have dwelt on its importance, bearings,
and developments with some persistence, and to have done so without much
recognition or encouragement, till lately. Of men of science, Mr. A. R.
Wallace and Professor Mivart gave me encouragement, but no one else has
done so. I sometimes saw, as in the Duke of Argyll's case, and in Mr.
Romanes' own, that men were writing at me, or borrowing from me, but with
the two exceptions already made, and that also of the Bishop of Carlisle,
not one of the literary and scientific notables of the day so much as
mentioned my name while making use of my work.

A few words more, and I will bring these remarks