MUSCLES 205 



total experience of an organism, may result in its co-operation in 

 the process of its progress towards higher things. Bergson hints 

 at such a process in organisms, but appears to allow nothing for the 

 individual in his elan vital, where the mass alone counts. So if the 

 two binding terms of Selection and Evolution must be granted 

 their enormous power over our thoughts, there must be also a loosing 

 as well as a binding, and we, as well as certain young ecclesiastics in 

 a hurry, may put in a plea for Life and Liberty. Thus is Lamarck- 

 ism immortal, and the integrative action of the nervous system 

 supplies the reason. 



This well-worn subject is not out of place here, where I am 

 trying to show evidence of self-expression in terms of muscular 

 modification arising from fresh activities of the brain. 



New Muscles. 



If it can be said without fear of question that " the differentia- 

 tion of muscle and nerve is the morphological result of division of 

 labour, whereby the unit of protoplasm, in which irritability and 

 contractility are combined, has, on the one hand, become modified 

 into muscle, which retains the property of contractility, and on the 

 other into nerve, which retains that of irritability," 1 and if Wolff's 

 Law of Bone Transformation teaches that if a normal bone is used 

 in a new way its structure and form will change to meet its new 

 function, which Sir Charles Bell had more vaguely taught in 1834, 

 it cannot well be denied that at certain turning-points in the history 

 of animal organisms the sequence of changes which arise is neural 

 change, muscular modification and finally change of bone, whether 

 ungulates, carnivores, felidae, gibbons or big anthropoids or man, 

 be the dramatis personce. The only question is whether selection 

 or use and habit initiates the subtle and slow process. 



Unstriped Muscles. 



The simplest of the muscular acquirements of mammals is of 

 course that great mass of little structures which constitutes the 

 unstriped musculature. I must admit that here again I am engaged 

 with what the professed biologist may call trifles, but these, like 

 some others of a corresponding rank, have a provoking quality of 

 persistence, and display, if one may personify them, an insistent 

 desire to know whence they come and why they are here. Some of 

 these, like the one before us, may be comprehended in the great 

 chapter of the Evolution of the Indifferent of which they form a 

 page. This world, at any rate in the moral sphere, would be an 



1 Macalister, op. cit., p. 62. 



