Zoology as Related to Evolution. 217 



through it like bayonets, had at the same time to keep the 

 pumps going of his own heart ; or that the orator, while 

 filling his audience with inspiring thoughts, had with every 

 respiration to give part of his mind to the filling of his own 

 lungs with breath ; or that the poet, right in the midst of his 

 subtle fancies and revelings in the ideal world, had ever and 

 anon to turn his eye in a fine frenzy rolling down on to his 

 liver to keep it from idling, or in along his digestive appara- 

 tus to make sure its thousand little nutrients were not send- 

 ing his nourishment off to the wrong places what power or 

 time would they have left for success in their immediate hu- 

 man work? More to us than any outward legacies from 

 human parents are these inherited habits within that we are 

 all born to from our animal progenitors. It is because they 

 used their volitions and vitality so well in the establishment 

 of such physical ones that we are able to go on and use ours 

 for the establishment of those that are intellectual and moral. 

 Out of their awful conflicts in the long past, seemingly the 

 expressions only of ferocity and cruelty, have come to us for 

 use in the mighty moral conflicts of civilization 



" The wrestling thews that throw the world." 



" Thirty centuries look down upon you," said Napoleon to 

 his soldiers as they went forth to the battle of the Pyramids. 

 Thirty eons look down upon nay, join you and fight with 

 you evolution says to every man who goes forth to the 

 battle of life. And with such an inheritance from the brutes 

 is it a thing very discreditable to us that we have had them 

 as our ancestors a philosophy wholly without significance 

 which shows thus the reason for Nature's method of human 

 descent?* 



* The line of thought here presented does not depend for its truth wholly on 

 how the question is decided which is now under discussion among zoologists, as 

 to whether qualities acquired by use are transmitted by inheritance, or only 

 those acquired by variation. As showing man's indebtedness to animals, it is in 

 a measure true either way ; but of course as a philosophy of life running up even 

 into human activity it is more complete and emphatic under the view that both 

 kinds are transmitted, a view which has on its side the great names of Spencer 

 and Darwin. Most of the arguments against the transmittableness of use varia- 

 tion are based on the assumption that the characteristics of animal nature were the 

 same in the past as now, always a dangerous assumption. When a species is new, 

 all its acquisitions, whether by variation or use, are vastly more unstable than 

 when it is old. There is a continual tendency in the generations which immedi- 

 ately follow a recent species not only to revert back to the old stock, but to vary 

 away from it yet further, as many a breeder who has tried to perpetuate a valu- 

 able variety either of animals or plants has sorrowfully found. It takes Nature's 

 streams a long while to wear down new channels into its bed rock, but just in 

 proportion as they are worn it becomes more and more difficult to change them 

 either by variation or use, a fact which explains not only why acquired qualities 

 are so little transmitted now, but why in the early history of life variations were 



