been wanting_, _than that the power which we observe_, _should have been
obtained without practice and memory_.

If we saw any self-consciousness on the baby's part about its breathing
or circulation, we might suspect that it had had less experience, or had
profited less by its experience, than its neighbours--exactly in the same
manner as we suspect a deficiency of any quality which we see a man
inclined to parade. We all become introspective when we find that we do
not know our business, and whenever we are introspective we may generally
suspect that we are on the verge of unproficiency. Unfortunately, in the
case of sickly children we observe that they sometimes do become
conscious of their breathing and circulation, just as in later life we
become conscious that we have a liver or a digestion. In that case there
is always something wrong. The baby that becomes aware of its breathing
does not know how to breathe and will suffer for his ignorance and
incapacity, exactly in the same way as he will suffer in later life for
ignorance and incapacity in any other respect in which his peers are
commonly knowing and capable. In the case of inability to breathe, the
punishment is corporal, breathing being a matter of fashion, so old and
long settled that nature can admit of no departure from the established
custom, and the procedure in case of failure is as much formulated as the
fashion itself. In the case of the circulation, the whole performance
has become one so utterly of rote, that the mere discovery that we could
do it at all was considered one of the highest flights of human genius.

It has been said a day will come when the Polar ice shall have
accumulated, till it forms vast continents many thousands of feet above
the level of the sea, all of solid ice. The weight of this mass will, it
is believed, cause the world to topple over on its axis, so that the
earth will be upset as an ant-heap overturned by a ploughshare. In that
day the icebergs will come crunching against our proudest cities, razing
them from off the face of the earth as though they were made of rotten
blotting-paper. There is no respect now of Handel nor of Shakespeare;
the works of Rembrandt and Bellini fossilise at the bottom of the sea.
Grace, beauty, and wit, all that is precious in music, literature, and
art--all gone. In the morning there was Europe. In the evening there
are no more populous cities nor busy hum of men, but a sea of jag