t and deliberation, may, by
habit, be rendered automatic. Witness the slow learning of its
letters by a child, and the subsequent facility of reading in a man,
when each group of letters which forms a word is instantly, and
without effort, fused to a single perception. Instance the
billiard-player, whose muscles of hand and eye, when he reaches the
perfection of his art, are unconsciously co-ordinated. Instance the
musician, who, by practice, is enabled to fuse a multitude of
arrangements, auditory, tactual, and muscular, into a process of
automatic manipulation. Combining such facts with the doctrine of
hereditary transmission, we reach a theory of Instinct. A chick,
after coming out of the egg, balances itself correctly, runs about,
picks up food, thus snowing that it possesses a power of directing its
movements to definite ends. How did the chick learn this very complex
co-ordination of eyes, muscles, and beak? It has not been
individually taught; its personal experience is nit; but it has the
benefit of ancestral experience. In its inherited organisation are
registered the powers which it displays at birth. So also as regards
the instinct of the hive-bee, already referred to. The distance at
which the insects stand apart when they sweep their hemispheres and
build their cells is 'organically remembered.' Man also carries with
him the physical texture of his ancestry, as well as the inherited
intellect bound up with it. The defects of intelligence during
infancy and youth are probably less due to a lack of individual
experience, than to the fact that in early life the cerebral
organisation is still incomplete. The period necessary for completion
varies with the race, and with the individual. As a round shot
outstrips the rifled bolt on quitting the muzzle of the gun, so the
lower race, in childhood, may outstrip the higher. But the higher
eventually overtakes the lower, and surpasses it in range. As regards
individuals, we do not always find the precocity of youth prolonged to
mental power in maturity; while the dulness of boyhood is sometimes
strikingly contrasted with the intellectual energy of after years.
Newton, when a boy, was weakly, and he showed no particular aptitude
at school; but in his eighteenth year he went to Cambridge, and soon
afterwards astonished his teachers by his power of dealing with
geometrical problems. During his quiet youth his brain was slowly
preparing itself to be the or