Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 8.djvu/328

314 of a candle or other bright object, he was as unable as an infant to apprehend its distance; so that, when told to lay hold of a watch, he groped at it just as a young child lying in its cradle." He gradually began to use his eyes; first in places with which he was not familiar, but it was several months before he trusted to them for guidance as other children of his age would do. No one will doubt the accuracy of any of these statements; but I cannot agree with Dr. Carpenter that he had in the case of the boy any thing "exactly parallel" to my experiment of hooding chickens at birth and giving them their sight at the end of one or two days. This boy was couched when three years old. Probably sight would have been at first rather puzzling to my chickens, had they not received it until they were six months old. Dr. Carpenter seems to have forgotten for the moment that instincts as well as acquisitions decay through desuetude, and that this is especially true when the faculties in question have never once been started into action and are of the kind which develop through exercise. Another and vital difference between Dr. Carpenter's experiments and mine is this, that, when at the end of two days I gave my chickens sight, I did not do so by poking out or lacerating the crystalline lenses of their eyes with a needle.

The presumption, then, that the progress of the infant is but the unfolding of inherited powers remains as strong as ever. With wings there comes to the bird the power to use them; and why should we believe that, because the human infant is born without teeth, it should, when they do make their appearance, have to discover their use by a series of happy accidents?

One word as to the origin of instincts. In common with other evolutionists, I have argued that instinct in the present generation may be regarded as the product of the accumulated experiences of past generations. More peculiar to myself, and giving special meaning to the word experience, is the view that the question of the origin of the most mysterious instinct is not more difficult than, or different from, but is the same with the problem of the origin of the physical structures of the creatures. For, however they may have come by their bodily organization, it, in my opinion, carries with it a corresponding mental nature.

In opposition to this view, it has been urged that we have only to consider almost any well-marked instinct to see that it could never have been a product of evolution. We, it is said most frequently, cannot conceive the experiences that might by inheritance have become the instincts; and we can see very clearly that many instincts are so essential to the preservation of the creatures that without them they could never have lived to acquire, them. The answer is easy. Granting our utter inability to go back in imagination through the infinite multitude of forms, with their diversified mental characteristics, that stand between the greyhound and the speck of living jelly to which,