circumstances come and go without much heed as
matters of course. If they have been lucky they make a note of it
and try to repeat their success. If they have been unfortunate but
have recovered rapidly they soon forget it; if they have suffered
long and deeply they grizzle over it and are scared and scarred by
it for a long time. The question is one of cognisance or non-
cognisance on the part of the new germs, of the more profound
impressions made on them while they were one with their parents,
between the occasion of their last preceding development and the new
course on which they are about to enter. Those who accept the
theory put forward independently by Professor Hering of Prague
(whose work on this subject is translated in my book Unconscious
Memory) and by myself in Life and Habit, believe in cognisance as do
Lamarckians generally. Weismannites, and with them the orthodoxy of
English science, find non-cognisance more acceptable.

If the Heringian view is accepted, that heredity is only a mode of
memory, and an extension of memory from one generation to another,
then the repetition of its development by any embryo thus becomes
only the repetition of a lesson learned by rote; and, as I have
elsewhere said, our view of life is simplified by finding that it is
no longer an equation of, say, a hundred unknown quantities, but of
ninety-nine only, inasmuch as two of the unknown quantities prove to
be substantially identical. In this case the inheritance of
acquired characteristics cannot be disputed, for it is postulated in
the theory that each embryo takes note of, remembers and is guided
by the profounder impressions made upon it while in the persons of
its parents, between its present and last preceding development. To
maintain this is to maintain use and disuse to be the main factors
throughout organic development; to deny it is to deny that use and
disuse can have any conceivable effect. For the detailed reasons
which led me to my own conclusions I must refer the reader to my
books Life and Habit and Unconscious Memory, the conclusions of
which have been often adopted, but never, that I have seen,
disputed. A brief resume of the leading points in the argument is
all that space will here allow me to give.

We have seen that it is a first requirement of heredity that there
shall be physical continuity between parents and offspring. This
holds good with memory. There must be continued identity between