204 THE FOUNDATIONS OF ZOOLOGY 



selection alone; for even if we admit all that has been said, it 

 seems to him to be self-evident that a reflex action must, from its 

 very nature, already be given in a state of working efficiency if it 

 is to work at all so as to count for anything in the struggle 

 for life. 



The history of the adjustment between tactile and muscular 

 sensations and the orderly balancing of all the movements con- 

 cerned in locomotion has been so long and complicated that we 

 know little of its details, but I am not sure I understand what 

 Romanes means by working efficiency. While slight irritation 

 of the sole is followed by retraction of the foot, more prolonged 

 irritation is followed, especially in the young, who have not yet 

 learned to repress them, by indefinite but violent involuntary 

 movements in many parts of the body, and I fail to see why any 

 of these vague movements might not have been picked out by 

 natural selection, if peculiarly useful, and gradually made more 

 delicate and more definite and more useful ; nor can I see why 

 each step in this process of gradual specialization may not have 

 been beneficial, or why it may not have had selective value. 



All admit that while natural selection picks out, and preserves, 

 it produces nothing, and if we can show how it corrects our bodily 

 movements and reduces them to exactness by giving us distinct 

 actions instead of confused and perplexed ones, I fail to see why 

 this process should not be gradual. Romanes, it is true, seems 

 to believe that responses which are now brought about involun- 

 tarily or unconsciously, by adaptive structure, would be easier to 

 understand if we could show that they arose as " consciously intel- 

 ligent adjustments " ; for he holds that the inheritance of the 

 effects of use furnishes an explanation of the origin of the adap- 

 tations which natural selection picks out and preserves, inasmuch 

 as it shows how natural selection has been aided by "consciously 

 intelligent action " ; but I cannot reconcile with other opinions 

 which I find in Romanes's works, his belief that a reflex response 

 would be any easier to understand if we could show that it was, 

 at one time, rational and accompanied by consciousness and 

 volition. 



Many thinkers of no little eminence, Romanes among them, 

 hold the opinion that not only instincts and habits, but rational 



