284 THE EVOLUTION OF A MOTHER. 



that lies before the human offspring no storage of 

 habit has been handed down from the past. Each 

 descendant must carve a way through the world for 

 itself, and learn to comport itself through all the vary 

 ing incidents of life as best it can. Now the equip 

 ment for this is very complex. Into the infant s frame 

 must be fitted not only the apparatus for automatic 

 repetition of what its parents have done, but the ap 

 paratus for intelligent initiation ; not only the machin 

 ery for carrying on the involuntary and reflex actions 

 involuntary and reflex because they have been done 

 so often by its ancestors as to have become auto 

 matic but for the voluntary and self-conscious life 

 which will do new things, choose fresh alternatives, 

 seek higher and more varied ends. The instrument 

 which will attend to breathing even when we forget 

 it; the apparatus which will make the heart beat even 

 though we try to stop it ; the self-acting spring which 

 makes the eyelid close the moment it is threatened 

 these and a hundred others are old and well-tried in 

 ventions which, from ceaseless practice generation 

 after generation, work perfectly in each new individual 

 from the start. Nature therefore need waste no time 

 at this late day on their improvement. But the higher 

 brain is comparatively a new thing in the world. It 

 has to undertake a vaster range of duties, often totally 

 new orders of duties ; it has to do things which its 

 forerunners had not quite learned to do, or had not 

 quite learned to do unthinkingly, and the inconceiv 

 ably complex machinery requires time to settle to its 

 work. The older brain-processes have been greatly 

 accelerated even now, and appear in full activity at 

 an early stage in the infant s life, but the newer and 



