"We are always seeing something which adds to our total stock of memories; we are always learning and doing something new. The vast majority of these experiences are similar in kind to those already passed through by our ancestors: they add nothing to the inheritance of the race. . . . Though they leave physical traces on the individual, they do not so far affect the underlying organisation of the brain as to make the development of after-brains somewhat different from previous ones. But there are certain functional activities which do tend so to alter the development of after-brains; certain novel or sustained activities which apparently result in the production of new correlated brain elements or brain connections hereditarily transmissible as increased potentialities of similar activity in the offspring." Of Natural Selection Mr. Allen writes much, as Professor Mivart and others have been writing for many years past. "It seems to me," he says, "easy to understand how survival of the fittest may result in progress starting from such functionally produced gains, but impossible to understand how it could result in progress if it had to start in mere accidental structural increments due to spontaneous variation alone." {252a} Mr. Allen may say this now, but until lately he has been among the first to scold any one else who said so. And this is how the article concludes:-- "The first hypothesis (Mr Darwin's) is one that throws no light upon any of the facts. The second hypothesis (which Mr. Allen is pleased to call Mr. Herbert Spencer's) is one that explains them all with transparent lucidity." {252b} So that Mr. Darwin, according to Mr. Allen, is clean out of it. Truly when Mr. Allen makes stepping-stones of his dead selves, he jumps upon them to some tune. But then Mr. Darwin is dead now. I have not heard of his having given Mr. Allen any manuscripts as he gave Mr. Romanes. I hope Mr. Herbert Spencer will not give him any. If I was Mr. Spencer and found my admirers crowning me with Lamarck's laurels, I think I should have something to say to them. What are we to think of a writer who declares that the theory that specific and generic changes are due to use and disuse "explains _all the facts_ with transparent lucidity"?