DARWINISM /iV THE NURSERY. 677 



seen in some parts of Texas and Australia, never from choice 

 stray far from the shelter of the woods ; and their ancestors, when 

 threatened, lay couched among the bushes like deer, in the hope 

 of escaping observation. It is very remarkable how quickly 

 horses and cattle, though domesticated for thousands of genera- 

 tions, during which long period many of their wild instincts and 

 habits have been entirely in abeyance, regain all the old power of 

 self-preservation proper to the wild state, and often in a single 

 generation become as acute in powers of scent and vision, and 

 other means of escaping from their enemies, as animals which 

 have never been tamed. There are at present probably no animals 

 so alert and difficult to approach as the " brumbies," of Australia. 

 In no way could more eloquently be shown the immense stretch 

 of time during which these qualities were formed and became 

 ingrained in the very nature and structure of their possessors than 

 by comparing them with the trivial and evanescent effects of 

 many centuries of domestication. 



In the case of our own race it has often been observed that 

 schoolboys present many points of resemblance to savages both in 

 their methods of thinking — especially about abstract subjects — 

 and in their actions. Younger children without a doubt also re- 

 flect some of the traits of their remote progenitors. If, as in the 

 case of the calf and the foal, we look for traces of habits of self- 

 preservation that for incalculably long periods were most neces- 

 sary for the safety of the individual (and therefore for the preser- 

 vation of the race), we shall find that such habits exist, and are 

 impossible to explain on any other hypothesis than that they were 

 once of essential service. 



Take, for instance, the shyness of very young children and 

 their evident terror and distress at the approach of a stranger. 

 At first sight it seems quite unaccountable that an infant a few 

 months old, who has experienced nothing but the utmost kindness 

 and tender care from every human being that it has seen, should 

 cling to its nurse and show every sign of alarm when some person 

 new to it approaches. Infants vary much in this respect, and the 

 habit is not by any means universal, though it is far more often 

 present than absent. This would suggest that, whatever its origin, 

 it was not for any very long period (in the evolutionary sense) ab- 

 solutely necessary to preserve the species from extinction. Darwin 

 merely alludes to the shyness of children as probably a remnant 

 of a habit common to all wild creatures. We need not, however, 

 go back to any remote ancestral form to find a state of affairs in 

 which it might prove of the greatest service. We know that the 

 cave-dwellers of the Dordogne Valley were cannibals, and that 

 much later, when the races that piled together the Danish 

 "kitchen middens" lived on the shores of the Baltic and German 



