VOLUNTARY MOTION. 447 



of the ages, incubated in the primitive submarine protoplasm, born as 

 the simple monad, creeping for aeons of time as the blind-worm upon 

 its belly, swimming for untold ages as the fish of the sea, flying as a 

 bird in the air for hundreds of thousands of years, and, for centuries 

 without number, roaming the earth as a mammal, and walking the 

 globe erect as a man. But, all this time, immense and inconceivable as 

 it is, would be too insignificant to enable one individual, unaided and 

 alone, to learn (were it accomplished by learning) to execute all those 

 infinite muscular contractions, and combinations of contractions, of 

 which we have spoken ; and we are only helped out of the difficulty by 

 a knowledge of the fact that, in the evolution of the power of volun- 

 tary motion and of the will, in the animal kingdom, during all the 

 immensity of the past ages, the organized experiences and acquisitions 

 of all the millions of individuals of each species of animal life were, by 

 the process of reproduction and the law of heredity, so completely 

 interchanged and shuffled up with each other that the organized expe- 

 riences and acquisitions of each individual became the organized ex- 

 periences and acquisitions of the species, and the organized experiences 

 and acquisitions of the species became the organized experiences and 

 acquisitions of each individual. 



We are now prepared to make an approximate estimate as to how 

 much of our command over our voluntary muscles is acquired by educa- 

 tion and experience, and how much is the result of the simple matura- 

 tion of an inheritance, which evolution had prepared and stored up for 

 us. If, as we have already shown, many millions of years would be 

 required to enable one individual to acquire as perfect a control of all 

 the voluntary muscles of the body as we know that each adult human 

 being has, how much of that could be acquired by the individual him- 

 self after birth ? Supposing him to reach the height of his muscular 

 capabilities at thirty years, and that only 3,000,000 years, instead of 

 many millions, are, as we have shown, necessary to enable him to ob- 

 tain that complete mastery over his voluntary muscles which he actually 

 possesses in. adult life, then his own individual acquirements would bear 

 the same ratio to his inherited acquirements that 30 bears to 3,000,000, 

 or that 1 bears to 100,000. Therefore, he inherits 99,999 parts, and 

 learns but 1 a quantity so small as to dwindle into almost nothingness 

 in the comparison. 



An apparent objection to our conclusions is met with in the fact 

 that the child does not use his 450 muscles, at birth, with the same 

 ease, precision, and freedom, that he does in after-years ; but, from the 

 helplessness of the babe, which can scarcely be said to make a single 

 voluntary movement, there is a gradual advance in the variety and ex- 

 tent of his control over his voluntary muscles, until we may say that, 

 by the time he reaches adult life, he is completely master of his volun- 

 tary muscular system. If, then, it is true that we acquire by education 

 and experience nothing, or almost nothing, of that vast department 



