by a nutritive fluid which they absorb directly; they have lost the digestive tract completely.

In the case of man such an evolution has not occurred, and there remains in the body a harmful organ like the large intestine. In consequence, it is impossible for him to take his nutriment in the most perfect form. If he were only to eat substances that could be almost completely absorbed, the large intestine would be unable to empty itself, and serious complications would be produced. A satisfactory system of diet has to make allowance for this, and in consequence of the structure of the alimentary canal, has to include in the food bulky and indigestible materials such as vegetables.

At this point I may refer to a topic of considerable general interest. Animals, in the choice of food for themselves or for their young, are guided by a blind and innate instinct. As I have shown in my second chapter, creatures like the fossorial wasps select only particular species of spiders or insects. Instinct directs them to the kind of food best suited to the wants of their progeny. Bees are attracted by the sweet juices of flowers; the silkworm instinctively devours the leaves of the mulberry and rejects most other plants. In higher animals, instinct plays the chief part in the choice of food. The difficulty of getting rats to eat poisoned food is well known; an instinct warns them of the danger of the material offered to them. In the same way dogs refrain from food that has been poisoned.

Every one has seen the minute attention bestowed by a monkey on food before beginning to eat it. It turns over what is offered, smells it carefully, cleans it, and before beginning to eat, subjects it to an examination that seems to us ridiculous. Monkeys often throw away food without

even biting it. None the less, in spite of an instinct so highly developed, monkeys poison themselves with all sorts of dangerous substances, even when these exhale a strange odour. I have seen monkeys die poisoned by the phosphorus of matches, or even by iodoform which they had contrived to steal.

In the case of man, aberrations of instinct in the choice of food are common. As soon as babies begin to walk, they lay hold of everything and try to eat it. Bits of paper, lumps of sealing-wax, the mucous matter from the nose, all appear to them to be things to eat. Constant guard has to be kept to prevent them from doing themselves an injury. Fruits and berries they cannot resist. Cases of poisoning very naturally are extremely frequent, and as every one must know of instances, I shall mention only a single case. "Messrs. Beadle and Sons, oil manufacturers at Boston, had thrown out, from the door of their establishment, a quantity of castor beans that were decayed and useless. Some children playing in the street mistook the seeds for pistachio nuts, and shared them with their friends. All the children seem to have eaten of them, with the result that more than seventy showed serious symptoms of poisoning."

The consumption of ergotised rye and of maize contaminated with certain leguminous plants (Lathyrus) frequently produces epidemics of poisoning without instinct intervening to protect the victims.

While the large intestine, acting as an asylum of harmful microbes, is a source of intoxication from within. the aberrant instinct of man leads him to poison himself from without with alcohol and ether, opium and morphia. The wide

* Stillmarck, in "Arbeiten des pharmacologischen Institutes zu Dorpat," vol. III., p. 110, 1889.

spread results of alcoholism show plainly the prevalent existence in man of a want of harmony between the instinct for choosing food and the instinct of preservation.

The digestive apparatus, then, affords abundant proof of the imperfection and disharmony of our nature. Moreover, there are many other proofs, as I shall show in the chapters to follow.

CHAPTER V

DISHARMONIES IN THE ORGANISATION AND ACTIVITIES OF THE REPRODUCTIVE APPARATUS. DISHARMONIES IN THE FAMILY AND SOCIAL INSTINCTS

I

Remarks on the disharmonies in the human organs of sense and perception.-—Rudimentary parts of the reproductive apparatus.-Origin and function of the hymen

THE digestive organs are not alone amongst the parts of the human body in exhibiting a greater or lesser disharmony. More than fifty years ago, a great German physiologist, Johannes Müller, showed that although the human eye was regarded as a very perfect organ, its power of correction for aberration of light was poor. Helmholz, another famous German man of science, stated that the optical study of the eye brought complete disillusion. "Nature," he said, "seems to have packed this organ with mistakes, as if with the avowed purpose of destroying any possible foundation for the theory that organs are adapted to their environment." Not only the eye, but the other organs by means of which we are conscious of the outside world, present natural disharmony. Therein lies the cause of our want of certainty about the sources of our perceptions. Memory, the faculty that registers our mental processes, becomes active much later than other faculties lodged in the brain. If the new-born human child were

relatively as well developed as the young guinea-pig, it is probable that we should know far more as to the history of our consciousnees of the external world. But without lingering over the disharmonies in our senses and faculties, I shall pass at once to a consideration of the apparatus for maintaining the species.

I have shown that the alimentary tract, the chief organ involved in the maintenance of the individual life, affords no proof of the theory that human nature is perfect. Is it the case that the organs of reproduction give a better result? When I wished to describe the most perfect examples of harmony to be found amongst plants, I chose the mechanism by which fertilisation is accomplished in flowers. The persistence of the species is secured, in the case of flowers, by a marvellous series of structures and functions.

Is the maintenance of the human species similarly provided for? A detailed investigation of the male and female human reproductive organs shows that these contain parts of diverse origin. The apparatus contains portions. of extremely ancient origin, and portions that have been acquired recently. The internal organs display traces of a remote hermaphroditism. In the male, there occur traces of the female apparatus, rudiments of the uterus and fallopian tubes. In the female, on the other hand, rudiments of the male structure persist. These traces date very far back in the history of the race, for they occur also in most other vertebrates. The facts seem to indicate that, at a very remote period, the ancestral vertebrates were hermaphrodite, and that they became divided into males and females only gradually, still retaining in each sex traces of the other sex. Such traces occur frequently, even in adult man, in the form of rudimentary organs (known as the