THE BUILDING OF REFLEX ARCS 255 



ages I have found the claws of the hind foot more like the blunt 

 claws of a dog than the familiar sharp claws of the Felidse. So in 

 the violent scratching referred to there maj- be a double reasou 

 associated in the process. As to the difference in the sharpness of 

 the fore and hind claws it would appear to be remarkably like a 

 transmitted bit of adaptation initiated and kept in being by use 

 and habit in progression, for the hind foot in such animals as the 

 cat has a larger share in this action than the fore foot. But here 

 it is difficult as so often to assign to selection its possible share of 

 the adjustment. 



Certain minor but persistent reflexes may be briefly mentioned 

 in support of this side of the evolutionary process. In the dog and 

 cat, as we know them, the action of the muscles of the tail by which 

 it is elevated during the act of defsecation is very suggestive of a 

 reflex acquired by a very small degree of physical comfort and 

 repeated in countless individuals, wild and domesticated. I have 

 seen not only this but a few small scratches made by a cat before 

 defsecation in a kitten as young as three weeks old. It is also 

 mentioned in illustration of a vestigial character that a horse will 

 paw the ground with no immediate apparent object, the act being 

 derived from ancestors which thus cleared away snow from the 

 ground. This is claimed, doubtfully I think, as a vestige of a 

 formerly useful habit but seems more probably to be one of these 

 indifferent reflexes connected with comfort than with survival - 

 value. 



It will be observed that in this branch of the case for 

 Lamarck v. Weismann the indirect evidence from inference far 

 exceeds in amount that of direct experimental evidence, but 

 from the nature of the problem under consideration this could 

 not be otherwise. 



If we may again look back in thought over the long series 

 of animals, from man downwards, we shall picture those of the 

 spinal level striving (with apologies for the use of an anthropo- 

 morphic word) to reach the sensory level and finding out the fact 

 that few there be that enter therein. Again we see in vision the 

 higher creatures of the sensory level reaching forwards to the strait 

 paths of primate existence, and again finding the difficulty of self- 

 advancement that their predecessors found. We see the elect few 

 of these, by a happy combination of nature and nurture, uprearing 

 to glory and honour the primate stock with its culmination in man. 

 A long vista indeed and a vision, but assuredly no mere figment 

 of the imagination, as some of the slender facts and arguments 

 here would seem to show. With Professor Bateson we personify 



