THE WONDER OF LIFE 607 



aware of these ' palaeo- atavistic ' qualities. There is a 

 terrible truth in Walt Whitman's picture of man emerging 

 ' stuccoed all over with reptiles and quadrupeds ', and in 

 Tennyson's picture of ' Reversion ever dragging Evolution 

 in the mud '. As Prof. Stanley Hall says : 



' We are influenced in our deeper, more temperamental, 

 dispositions by the life-habits and codes of conduct of 

 we know not what unnumbered hosts of ancestors, which 

 like a cloud of witnesses are present throughout our lives, 

 and our souls are echo- chambers in which their whispers 

 reverberate '. 



The idea of the living past is familiar in connexion with 

 those vestigial structures, like the teeth in whalebone 

 whales, which persist in many animals as tell-tale evidences 

 of remote ancestry like the unsounded letters in words 

 or the superfluous flaps and buttons in our clothing which 

 once had a functional significance. Our own body is a 

 veritable museum of relics some (like the notochord) 

 disappearing in embryonic life, others (like the Eustachian 

 tube) persisting in greatly disguised form, others (like the 

 third eyelid) remaining as dwindling vestiges, and others 

 (like the vermiform appendix) not merely outliving their 

 usefulness, but proving themselves dangerous anachronisms. 



It goes without saying that the mere persistence of 

 dwindling organs and of habits that have become anachron- 

 isms, is not evidence of misadaptation. The useless teeth 

 of the baleen whale, the unseeing eyes of many cave-animals, 

 and the now meaningless relics of wild habits which many 

 domesticated animals exhibit, present no particular diffi- 

 culty. They are the vanishing vestiges of characters 

 that were once effective and adaptive. This remains a 

 satisfactory answer except to those who expect a perfect 



