GREAT STEPS IN ORGANIC EVOLUTION 899 



ANACHRONISMS. — It is fundamentally characteristic of living 

 creatures that their past lives in their present. This is famiharly 

 illustrated at various levels, rising on the psychological side to true 

 memory in the individual lifetime; but it is equally true of the 

 organic racial past, that it lives again in the individual. In some 

 way that we cannot picture, the germ-cell is a repertory of experi- 

 ments in organisation that were taken by ancestral germ-cells, and 

 confirmed in the lifetime of individual ancestors. Enregistration of 

 the past is characteristic of life. Only in a very restricted way does 

 the past live on in the present of lifeless things. They say that a bar 

 of iron is never quite the same after it has been severely jarred, 

 and there is much inquiry nowadays into the "fatigue" of metals. 

 We have even read of an oil that showed traces of "memory"; but 

 this must surely have been a freak. Personally, we do not know 

 enough to follow this line of thought, yet there are musicians who 

 would never dream of lending their violin to a mediocre player; 

 and it is quite possible that a really subtle instrument responds in 

 some way not readily statable to the usage it gets from a fine 

 fiddler. 



It is a good rule of sound thinking not to try to make different 

 things seem the same ; and therefore we feel that there is apt to be 

 a fallacy, or at least an exaggeration, in using such metaphors as 

 the "fatigue" of metals and a violin's "memory". Yet there is no 

 doubt that in the inorganic domain there are adumbrations of 

 what is characteristic of living creatures, the power of enregistering 

 experience so that it influences subsequent behaviour. The universe 

 has continuity. But it is only in hving creatures that we can speak 

 with firmness of the past living on in the present — enduring in the 

 sense of Bergson's untranslatable "duree" — ^not duration, but 

 enduration, and more. 



But great advantages often involve a tax, and the tax on the 

 enregistration of the past is the risk of retaining what become 

 anachronisms. For this law is even-handed; along with much that 

 is invaluable there may be a hereditary entailment of some item or 

 feature that has outlived its utility, and may even have become a 

 handicap. Yet this last is far too much to say of most of the 

 vestigial organs which are of common occurrence in animals; most 

 of them are neither here nor there ; they are not even expensive to 

 keep up; they are negligible survivals, like the unsounded letters in 

 many words, like the "o" in leopard or the "b" in doubt. The 

 whale is not burdened by its deeply buried vestigial hip-girdle and 

 hind-legs, and there is no reason to beheve that the unborn whale- 

 bone whale is put about by the persistence of two sets of vestigial 

 teeth which never cut the gums. Relics of the past are apt to vary 

 in a curious way, and they may become seats of disease, partly 

 because they are out of the current of healthfulness; but in most 



