Certain minor but persistent reflexes may be briefly mentioned in support of this side of the evolutionary process. In the dog and cat, as we know them, the action of the muscles of the tail by which it is elevated during the act of defæcation is very suggestive of a reflex acquired by a very small degree of physical comfort and repeated in countless individuals, wild and domesticated. I have seen not only this but a few small scratches made by a cat before defæcation in a kitten as young as three weeks old. It is also mentioned in illustration of a vestigial character that a horse will paw the ground with no immediate apparent object, the act being derived from ancestors which thus cleared away snow from the ground. This is claimed, doubtfully I think, as a vestige of a formerly _useful_ habit but seems more probably to be one of these indifferent reflexes connected with comfort than with survival-value. It will be observed that in this branch of the case for Lamarck _v._ Weismann the indirect evidence from inference far exceeds in amount that of direct experimental evidence, but from the nature of the problem under consideration this could not be otherwise. If we may again look back in thought over the long series of animals, from man downwards, we shall picture those of the spinal level striving (with apologies for the use of an anthropomorphic word) to reach the sensory level and finding out the fact that few there be that enter therein. Again we see in vision the higher creatures of the sensory level reaching forwards to the strait paths of primate existence, and again finding the difficulty of self-advancement that their predecessors found. We see the elect few of these, by a happy combination of nature and nurture, uprearing to glory and honour the primate stock with its culmination in man. A long vista indeed and a vision, but assuredly no mere figment of the imagination, as some of the slender facts and arguments here would seem to show. With Professor Bateson we personify Nature in the story, with her wonted coyness betraying the fact that though she is stern she has her tolerant moods; that she allows her children, even that “insurgent son” who calls himself Homo Sapiens, a genial liberty to frame new reflex-arcs which make for his enjoyment of life in indifferent fields, and _that the great neural process of Facilitation is the leading factor in their constructions and probably also in more deeply-based systems of sensori-motor arcs_. SUMMARY. Though it be true that _dolus latet in generalibus_, it is a more important truth that “without premature generalisations the true generalisation would never be arrived at.”[89] [89] Herbert Spencer, _Essays_, II, 57. Therefore I conclude:--