If, instead of putting the feet of the prepared frog spoken of a few paragraphs back in acidulated water, we drop the irritant upon the thigh, the corresponding foot is raised at once and bent upward so as to brush off the acid. If the foot has been cut off, the bleeding stump will still be bent upward, and if it be too short to reach the irritated spot, then the other foot will be raised and a determined effort be made to remove the offending liquid. All these movements certainly look as though the frog felt the acid and endeavored to get rid of it. Not so, however. Drop this same frog into water which is gradually heated. The batrachian does not try to get out, but sits motionless until he is boiled. Surely, if he felt the drop of vinegar on his foot, much more would he feel the boiling water bathing his whole surface. Curiously enough, if the acid be put upon the leg of the frog while in the water, the movements will be the same as if he were on the table. These experiments and the experiences of daily life clearly show the truth of the assertion recently made, that the fact that an action has a purpose does not prove its connection with consciousness. If Evolution be correct, there is no difficulty in explaining the doings of the beheaded frog. It is a law governing nervous function that every time an action is repeated the tendency to repeat the action is increased, until at last habit becomes a governing law, and under certain circumstances actions, at first wilful, become unconscious. The first earth-born batrachian, perhaps, felt during the first hour of his existence some irritant on his leg and scratched it away. The next hour the process was again gone through, and so on until the frog was gathered to his fathers. His children found themselves a little more disposed to scratch than was their progenitor; and at last, so well accustomed did the spinal cord become to move the feet when the irritant touched the leg that the motions were carried out without waiting for the will to command, and the particular reflex movements which astonish the late-born human philosopher became a fixed habit. In such movements as have been described are to be found the simplest form of _automatism_, the term being used to express the doing of actions which are performed for an end, but in which consciousness plays no part.