38 EVOLUTION, OLD AND NEW. 



the facts of heredity become as simple as those of a 

 man making a tobacco pipe, and rudimentary organs 

 are s6en to be essentially of the same character as the 

 little rudimentary protuberance at the bottom of the 

 pipe to which I referred in ' Erewhon.' * 



These organs are now no longer useful, but they 

 once were so, and were therefore once purposive, though 

 not so now. They are the expressions of a bygone use- 

 fulness ; sayings, as it were, about which there was at 

 one time infinite wrangling, as to what both the mean- 

 ing and the expression should best be, so that they then 

 had living significance in the mouths of those who used 

 them, though they have become such mere shibboleths 

 and cant formulae to ourselves that we think no more 

 of their meaning than we do of Julius Caesar in the 

 month of July. They continue to be reproduced through 

 the force of habit, and through indisposition to get out 

 of any familiar groove of action until it becomes too 

 unpleasant for us to remain in it any longer. It has 

 long been felt that embryology and rudimentary struc- 

 tures indicated community of descent. Dr. Darwin and 

 Lamarck insisted on this, as have all subsequent writers 

 on evolution ; but the explanation of why and how the 

 structures come to be repeated— namely, that they are 

 simply examples of the force of habit— can only be 

 perceived intelligently by those who admit so much 

 unity between parents and offspring that the self- 

 development of the latter can be properly called 

 habitual (as being a repetition of an act by one and 

 the same ipdividual), and can only be fully sympa- 

 ♦ Page 2J0, first edition. 



