Heredity in Man. 329 



are the instinctive activities of man ? They appear to be 

 for the most part certain performances, some of them 

 rising little if at all above the level of reflex actions, which 

 are the heritage of our animal nature. Sucking and 

 taking the breast, hanging to one's fingers or to a stick, 

 as Dr. Louis Robinson * has well shown, certain methods 

 of progression on all fours, according to Mr. S. S. Buck- 

 man,! co-ordinated leg movements for walking, an early 

 and probably instinctive differential response in arm and 

 hand movements according as an object is within or 

 beyond their reach, and a tendency to use the right hand 

 where strong effort is required, as Prof. Mark Baldwin % 

 has shown (the latter, so far as we know, a distinctively 

 human trait) ; these and the sexual instincts, together 

 with the coarser emotions and their more or less definite 

 expression, well nigh exhaust the list. And there is 

 little in them to throw any light upon these problems 

 of instinct which it is our business to discuss ; little to 

 help us in deciding between the rival claims of a purely 

 Darwinian and an exclusively Lamarckian theory of 

 origin. 



The faculty of speech has been suggested as likely to 

 afford evidence of a decisive sort ; but as matters stand 

 there is not much to be gained from it when it is cross- 

 examined as a witness. Prof. Weismann indeed brought 

 forward the absence of any instinctive result of the habit 

 of speech as an argument against the transmission of 

 acquired characters. "Not even are our children," he 

 said, "able to talk of their own accord; yet not only 

 have their parents, but more than that, an infinitely long 



* Nineteenth Century, November, 1891. 



t Nature, November 8, 1894, vol. li. p. 31. Cf. Nineteenth Century, for 

 November, 1894. 



% "Mental Development in the Child and the Race," pp. 54 and 64. 



