We are told on high authority that not education but educability is transmissible, and yet this humble reflex appears in very young dogs that could hardly if ever have known the impact of a stone. Incidentally we are compelled to remember how in past battles of our youth the aim both of “ourselves and the enemy” was deplorably poor, and not from want of practice. This school-boy-stone reflex is either an example of educational effects transmitted or of a minute bit of the unpacking of an original complexity which it would require the brain of a de Quincey to work out. But if we suppose the initial stages of such a stimulus as the occasional impact of a stone in many generations to be slowly ingrained in the skin-receptors, reflex-arcs and receptors we do not need opium either for the acceptance of orthodox dogma or to aid us in the Mendelian alternative to a very simple ideal construction. This digression bears on the initiative of the more important scratch-reflex, and it is profitable to ask “are not both of these reflexes in dogs examples of Evolution of the Indifferent?” Is it possible to imagine that from its inception to its fully-formed state, with a specialised territory of skin-receptors accurately mapped out, with receptor neurones, reflex-arcs and adapted effectors, this scratch-reflex can have arisen through Germinal Selection or selective processes within the germ? At no stage can anything more than a contribution to more or less comfort to the animal be held to result from its operation. It is strangely reminiscent of the proceedings of an elderly man after lunch on a hot day when he protects his head against house-flies with a handkerchief. I am aware that it is but one of a large number of reflexes produced for the purpose of grooming the trunk head or limbs of animals as low down in the scale as the house-fly or grasshopper, many of which were beautifully described a few years ago by Miss Frances Pitt in the _National Review_ in an article dealing with small mammals, chiefly rodents. But I have availed myself here as elsewhere, of the liberty of doing what Professor Sherrington says we may do, and consider this scratch-reflex as split off from the rest of the animal’s behaviour for the purpose of analysis. He also says in discussing the subject of parasites moving across the receptive surface of the skin that the ulterior purpose may be the removal of what “would confuse its function as a receptive surface to more significant environmental stimuli.” This statement is hypothetical and the problem obscure; but at any rate we know this that the removal of the parasite must conduce to the greater comfort of the dog without any more recondite purpose. The one suggested by Professor Sherrington would in some possible but very vague manner be referable to selection, but, whether the suggestion be valid or not, it is almost impossible to suppose that a saddle-shaped area of the kind described could be under the guidance of selection.