Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 40.djvu/697

Rh seen in some parts of Texas and Australia, never from choice stray far from the shelter of the woods; and their ancestors, when threatened, lay couched among the bushes like deer, in the hope of escaping observation. It is very remarkable how quickly horses and cattle, though domesticated for thousands of generations, during which long period many of their wild instincts and habits have been entirely in abeyance, regain all the old power of self-preservation proper to the wild state, and often in a single generation become as acute in powers of scent and vision, and other means of escaping from their enemies, as animals which have never been tamed. There are at present probably no animals so alert and difficult to approach as the "brumbies," of Australia. In no way could more eloquently be shown the immense stretch of time during which these qualities were formed and became ingrained in the very nature and structure of their possessors than by comparing them with the trivial and evanescent effects of many centuries of domestication.

In the case of our own race it has often been observed that schoolboys present many points of resemblance to savages both in their methods of thinking—especially about abstract subjects—and in their actions. Younger children without a doubt also reflect some of the traits of their remote progenitors. If, as in the case of the calf and the foal, we look for traces of habits of self-preservation that for incalculably long periods were most necessary for the safety of the individual (and therefore for the preservation of the race), we shall find that such habits exist, and are impossible to explain on any other hypothesis than that they were once of essential service.

Take, for instance, the shyness of very young children and their evident terror and distress at the approach of a stranger. At first sight it seems quite unaccountable that an infant a few months old, who has experienced nothing but the utmost kindness and tender care from every human being that it has seen, should cling to its nurse and show every sign of alarm when some person new to it approaches. Infants vary much in this respect, and the habit is not by any means universal, though it is far more often present than absent. This would suggest that, whatever its origin, it was not for any very long period (in the evolutionary sense) absolutely necessary to preserve the species from extinction. Darwin merely alludes to the shyness of children as probably a remnant of a habit common to all wild creatures. We need not, however, go back to any remote ancestral form to find a state of affairs in which it might prove of the greatest service. We know that the cave-dwellers of the Dordogne Valley were cannibals, and that much later, when the races that piled together the Danish "kitchen middens" lived on the shores of the Baltic and German