The child, as it grows, ceases to remind us of the ape. Its nose gets bigger as its toes cease to wriggle and learn to stand. But, for years of its life, it is only too apt to remind us of the savage. How greedy it often is! How readily it snatches that which does not belong to it! How quick it is to quarrel with its playmates, and to fight! How noisy when at play! How cross when it meets with disappointment! How fond of tawdry things! In all these qualities we see the history of the race, repeating itself in the life of the individual. The savage has preceded the civilised family--the child shows us the faults of a lower race. With the elapse of years they disappear, and are replaced by the more amiable and gracious manners of the adult human being. Nor do we need to go into the nursery to find links with our inferiors. Much, indeed far too much, has been written of late years about "atavistic degeneracy"; that is to say, degeneracy which imitates the characteristics of our forefathers. Many things which are classed as diseases, whether of the body, mind, or moral nature, may be explained in this way. Take the gills, which, as we have stated, exist in all vertebrates, but not in the adult of the highest groups. In a sickly individual, even among the highest vertebrates, traces of these are sometimes seen existing in the adult, as a gap or open space in the neck, called by the medical man "cervical fistula": this is an instance of degeneracy in the body. Take, for another instance, the kleptomaniac, who snatches up everything he takes a fancy to, although he is not in want. This is degeneracy of the mind, a relic of savage nature out of place in civilised man. Yet the gill-space is an ancestral feature which has its right time to appear, though it is out of place in the adult; and the "want-to-snatch" stage, as we have already seen, is quite natural in the young child. A parallel instance to the last is that of the hysterical girl who invents all sorts of tales about her harrowing adventures, weaving in stories she has heard of other people, with an account of her own life. She is an impostor; but her instinct for weaving yarns is that of the savage, who is the more admired by his fellows the more he can show himself a liar. Even the dangerous criminal, such as the Anarchist assassin, is comparable with the treacherous savage, who stabs his guest, and with the fierce animal that bites the hand that feeds it.