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He replied that Professor Ray Lankester had written a letter about it in Nature some time ago, but he could not remember exactly when, and had given extracts from a lecture by Professor Ewald Hering, who had originated the theory. I said I should not look at it, as I had completed that part of my work, and was on the point of going to press.
I can hardly say how relieved I was to find that it sprung no mine upon me, but that, so far as I could gather, Professor Hering and I had come to pretty much the same conclusion. I had already found the passage in Dr. Erasmus Darwin which I quoted in "Evolution, Old and New," but may perhaps as well repeat it here. It runs
Spencer himself this point is altogether ignored; make it clear as Professor Hering made it put continued personality and memory in the foreground as Professor Hering did, instead of leaving them to be discovered "by implications," and then such expressions as "accumulated experiences" and "experience of the race" become luminous; till this had been done they were Vox et praeterea nihil.
Animals and plants, according to Professor Hering, are guided throughout their development, and preserve the due order in each step which they take, through memory of the course they took on past occasions when in the persons of their ancestors.
Romanes could not contradict himself more hopelessly than Mr. Romanes often does. Indeed in one of the very passages I have quoted in order to show that Mr. Over and over again Mr. Romanes insists that it is heredity which does this or that. Herbert Spencer, Darwin, and Lewes have done. This, however, is, exactly what Professor Hering, whom I have unwittingly followed, does.
Then we had the Mnemic theory of Hering, Butler, and others, by which the unconscious memory of the embryo even the germ is the explanation.
Herbert Spencer, Theodor Eimer, Lester Ward, Hering, and Zehnder have pointed out the untenable consequences of this position. I hold, with Lamarck and Darwin, that the hereditary transmission of acquired characters is one of the most important phenomena in biology, and is proved by thousands of morphological and physiological experiences.
Variations, whether produced functionally or not, can only be perpetuated and accumulated because they can be inherited; and this applies just as much to the lower as to the higher forms of life; the question which Professor Hering and I have tried to answer is, "How comes it that anything can be inherited at all?
In execution of the power conferred upon me by the act making appropriations for the expenses of the District of Columbia for the year ending June 30, 1890, I did on the 17th day of August last appoint Rudolph Hering, of New York, Samuel M. Gray, of Rhode Island, and Frederick P. Stearns, of Massachusetts, three eminent sanitary engineers, to examine and report upon the system of sewerage existing in the District of Columbia.
One of the most striking alleged facts connected with the mysterious relation existing between the serpent and-the human species is the influence which the poison of the Crotulus, taken internally, seemed to produce over the moral faculties, in the experiments instituted by Dr. Hering at Surinam.
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