his other-personality--but
not so strong a one as mine--that has in some few others given rise to
belief in personal reincarnation experiences. It is very plausible to
such people, a most convincing hypothesis. When they have visions of
scenes they have never seen in the flesh, memories of acts and events
dating back in time, the simplest explanation is that they have lived
before.

But they make the mistake of ignoring their own duality. They do
not recognize their other-personality. They think it is their own
personality, that they have only one personality; and from such a
premise they can conclude only that they have lived previous lives.

But they are wrong. It is not reincarnation. I have visions of myself
roaming through the forests of the Younger World; and yet it is not
myself that I see but one that is only remotely a part of me, as my
father and my grandfather are parts of me less remote. This other-self
of mine is an ancestor, a progenitor of my progenitors in the early
line of my race, himself the progeny of a line that long before his time
developed fingers and toes and climbed up into the trees.

I must again, at the risk of boring, repeat that I am, in this one
thing, to be considered a freak. Not alone do I possess racial memory
to an enormous extent, but I possess the memories of one particular and
far-removed progenitor. And yet, while this is most unusual, there is
nothing over-remarkable about it.

Follow my reasoning. An instinct is a racial memory. Very good. Then you
and I and all of us receive these memories from our fathers and mothers,
as they received them from their fathers and mothers. Therefore there
must be a medium whereby these memories are transmitted from generation
to generation. This medium is what Weismann terms the "germplasm." It
carries the memories of the whole evolution of the race. These memories
are dim and confused, and many of them are lost. But some strains
of germplasm carry an excessive freightage of memories--are, to be
scientific, more atavistic than other strains; and such a strain is
mine. I am a freak of heredity, an atavistic nightmare--call me what you
will; but here I am, real and alive, eating three hearty meals a day,
and what are you going to do about it?

And now, before I take up my tale, I want to anticipate the doubting
Thomases of psychology, who are prone to scoff, and who would otherwise
surely say that the coherence of my dreams is due to overstu