Before Adam

Abstract

IN Mr. London's story a man has persistent dreams, in which he sees “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 a progeny of a line that long before his time developed fingers and toes and climbed up into the trees. … An instinct is a racial memory … there must be a medium whereby these memories are transmitted from generation to generation. This medium is what Weismann calls the germ-plasm. It carries the memories of the whole evolution of the race.”