I submit that I have correctly translated Mr. Romanes’ meaning, and also that we have a right to complain of his not saying what he has to say in words which will involve less “ganglionic friction” on the part of the reader.

Another example may be found on p. 43 of Mr. Romanes’ book.  “Lastly,” he writes, “just as innumerable special mechanisms of muscular co-ordinations are found to be inherited, innumerable special associations of ideas are found to be the same, and in one case as in the other the strength of the organically imposed connection is found to bear a direct proportion to the frequency with which in the history of the species it has occurred.”

Mr. Romanes is here intending what the reader will find insisted on on p. 51 of “Life and Habit;” but how difficult he has made what could have been said intelligibly enough, if there had been nothing but the reader’s comfort to be considered.  Unfortunately that seems to have been by no means the only thing of which Mr. Romanes was thinking, or why, after implying and even saying over and over again that instinct is inherited habit due to inherited memory, should he turn sharply round on p. 297 and praise Mr. Darwin for trying to snuff out “the well-known doctrine of inherited habit as advanced by Lamarck”?  The answer is not far to seek.  It is because Mr. Romanes did not merely want to tell us all about instinct, but wanted also, if I may use a homely metaphor, to hunt with the hounds and run with the hare at one and the same time.

I remember saying that if the late Mr. Darwin “had told us what the earlier evolutionists said, why they said it, wherein he differed from them, and in what way he proposed to set them straight, he would have taken a course at once more agreeable with usual practice, and more likely to remove misconception from his own mind and from those of his readers.” {59a} This I have no doubt was one of the passages which made Mr. Romanes so angry with me.  I can find no better words to apply to Mr. Romanes himself.  He knows perfectly well what others have written about the connection between heredity and memory, and he knows no less well that so far as he is intelligible at all he is taking the same view that they have taken.  If he had begun by saying what they had said, and had then improved on it, I for one should have been only too glad to be improved upon.

Mr. Romanes has spoiled his book just because this plain old-fashioned method of procedure was not good enough for him.  One-half the obscurity which makes his meaning so hard to apprehend is due to exactly the same cause as that which has ruined so much of the late Mr. Darwin’s work—­I mean to a desire to appear to be differing altogether from others with whom he knew himself after all to be in substantial agreement.  He adopts, but (probably quite unconsciously) in his anxiety to avoid appearing to adopt, he obscures what he is adopting.

Here, for example, is Mr. Romanes’ definition of instinct:-