216 Zoology as Related to Evolution. 



of an egg, he noticed that after the shell had broken apart, 

 and while the chick was yet in one side of it, a fly lighted 

 on the other. Instantly the little creature, not wholly 

 hatched as yet, darted its bill out for the fly and caught it 

 and ate it up ; and in doing so, the naturalist reckoned that 

 it must have made, bodily and mentally, at least three thou- 

 sand co-ordinated motions, each one of them absolutely per- 

 fect. Where did it get its skill ? " Instinct," said old igno- 

 rance. " Inherited habit," says new evolution. Millions of 

 mature chickens in the generations before it had spent their 

 lives in catching flies, and the skill they had acquired came 

 down to their descendant in its blood. So with man in his 

 facility for catching flies, whether they be in the shape of 

 milk on his mother's breast, or of base-ball on the play- 

 ground, or, further along, of crinkled lightning on the 

 breast of earth, it comes how largely from the skill of mus- 

 cle trained into him by the brutes. We live not only out- 

 wardly on strata of rock filled with their bones, but in- 

 wardly on strata of flesh filled with their deeds. The whole 

 marvelous story of paleontology is recapitulated in every babe 

 that creeps, the four-footed ways of its fossils in the very 

 creeping itself. Honestly indeed, as the saying is, do boys 

 come by the monkey tricks and the habits of sliding down 

 banisters and climbing up trees, reckless of clothes, they are 

 so notorious for, acquired in far-off tropic forests when liter- 

 ally it was " Rock-a-by, baby, in the tree-top," and when the 

 only nursery tales they had to amuse themselves with were 

 what they carried appended to their own bodies, and the 

 only pantaloons to tear, those which their mother Nature 

 had made. Primeval heats, which blotted all traces of the 

 Eozoon out of Laurentian limestone, left the marks of it 

 cindered on the inner, more imperishable bed-rock of the 

 geologist himself who goes out in its search. And live men 

 are not only " dead men warmed over," as Holmes has ex- 

 pressed it, but with them dead animals warmed over, whose 

 subtler selves, never dying, still wriggle and crawl and climb 

 in our every bone and nerve. 



The value of the unconscious automatic functioning thus 

 established in the human body it is hardly possible to over- 

 estimate. Suppose that man had to superintend and exe- 

 cute each act of his physical living by the direct conscious 

 exercise of his own will ; suppose the sailor, reefing the top- 

 gallant sails of his ship in a tornado, with the masts swing- 

 ing through the air like whips and the lightnings jabbing 



