The panniculus carnosus, of which the facial muscles are part, is a great system of musculature found in various animal forms, and it furnishes a field for study of the evolution of the indifferent and the initial stages of the formation of a muscle. This is a servant of the brain in a more indirect manner than the facial muscles, but it, too, arises in obedience to the integrative action of the brain. The early specialisation of it need not be considered here. It may be considered unwarrantable to claim the great Fly-shaker muscle of Ungulates as an indifferent structure, but the arguments by which the Pan-Selectionist would annex it to his sceptre, as a triumph of the minute care of the organism by selection, rest only on the assumption that he knows how it has become an adaptation to the life of its possessors. This is now more than it used to be a matter of opinion since the publication of Professor Bateson’s revolutionary _Materials_, and others beside he have reserved to themselves the liberty of doubting the accepted explanations by the tangled path of adaptation. The statement of Weismann, “Everything is adapted in animated nature” was necessary to his theory of germinal selection, but it admits of extensive and numerous exceptions in view of the fact that so much of adaptation is partial and imperfect. If he had said that _every organism_ as a being is adapted he would have been nearer the truth, but that every tissue and part of an organism is adapted is demonstrably untrue. A large number of organisms, themselves apparently well adapted, flourish well enough and reproduce their kind in spite of faulty and rudimentary tissues and parts. If it were not so we should have seen little of progress except what come under the laws of genetics,--a distributional matter. Even the super-Geddes could not distribute what was not there, for he could not deal with raw materials and change them by a fairy wand into manufactured articles. In the great field of domesticated plants and animals man has to find not only some mutation or some dominant strain and breed it to his will, but to cultivate the domestic qualities of animals and employ cultural conditions for plants. There is doubt expressed as to the length of time or numbers of generations during which these cultural conditions can extend, but Professor Thiselton Dyer many years ago made the remarkable statement as to plants:--“While specific stability under constant conditions appears to be the rule in nature, it is widely different in cultivation. When a plant is brought under cultural conditions it maintains its type for some time unaltered, then gives way and becomes practically plastic. From my experience at Kew, where I saw the process continually going on, I hazarded the generalisation that any species, annually reproduced from seed, could be broken down in five years. During that period specific stability, though menaced, tends to maintain itself. Darwin was well aware of this.”[76]