enerally. Powerful tastes--as is incontestably shown in
the cases of alcohol and tobacco--lie latent for ages, and suddenly
become manifest when suitable conditions arise. Every discovery, and
each step in social and moral evolution, produces its wide-spreading
train of consequences. I see no reason why use-inheritance need be
credited with any share in the cumulative results of the invention of
printing and the steam-engine and gunpowder, or of freedom and security
under representative government, or of science and art and the partial
emancipation of the mind of man from superstition, or of the innumerable
other improvements or changes that take place under modern civilization.

Mr. Spencer suggests an inquiry whether the greater powers possessed by
eminent musicians were not mainly due to the inherited effect of the
musical practice of their fathers (p. 19). But these great musicians
inherited far more than their parents possessed. The excess of their
powers beyond their parents' must surely be attributed to spontaneous
variation; and who shall say that the rest was in any way due to
use-inheritance? If, too, the superiority of geniuses proves
use-inheritance, why should not the inferiority of the sons of geniuses
prove the existence of a tendency which is the exact opposite of
use-inheritance? But nobody collects facts concerning the degenerate
branches of musical families. Only the favourably varying branches are
noticed, and a general impression of rapid evolution of talent is thus
produced. Such cases might be explained, too, by the facts that musical
faculty is strong in both sexes, that musical families associate
together, and that the more gifted members may intermarry. Great
musicians are often astonishingly precocious. Meyerbeer "played
brilliantly" at the age of six. Mozart played beautifully at four. Are
we to suppose that the effect of the _adult_ practice of parents was
inherited at this early age? If use-inheritance was not necessary in the
case of Handel, whose father was a surgeon, why is it needed to account
for Bach?

LACK OF EVIDENCE.

The "direct proofs" of use-inheritance are not as plentiful as might be
desired, it appears (pp. 24-28). This acknowledged "lack of recognized
evidence" is indeed the weakest feature in the case, though Mr. Spencer
would fain attribute this lack of direct proof to insufficient
investigation and to the inconspicuous nature of the inheritance of the
modification. B