A WHALE’S HIND LEGS

Otago Witness, Issue 3972, 29 April 1930, Page 72

A WHALE’S HIND LEGS

Enregistration of the past is characteristic of life (says Professor J. Arthur Thomson in John o’ London’s Weekly). Only in a very restricted way does the past live on in the present of lifeless things. They say that a bar of iron is never quite the same after it has been severely jarred, and there is much inquiry nowadays into the “ fatigue ”of metals. There are musicians who would never dream of lending their violin to a mediocre player; and it is quite possible that a really subtle instrument responds in some way not readily statable to the usage it gets from a fine fiddler.

It is a rule of sound thinking not to try to make different things seem the same, and therefore we feel that there is apt to be a fallacy in using such metaphors as the “ fatigue ” of metals and a violin’s “ memory.”

There can be no doubt that in the organic domain there are adumbrations of what is characteristic of living creatures, the power of enregistering experience so that it influences subsequent behaviour. The universe has continuity. But it is only in living creatures that we can speak with firmness of the past living on in the present—- “ enduring ” in the sense of Bergson’s untranslatable duree.

But great ad vantages.often involve a tax, and the tax on the enregistration of the past is the risk of anachronisms. For the law is even-handed; along with much that is invaluable there may be a hereditary entailment of some item or feature that has outlived its utility, and may even have become a handicap. This cannot be said of most of the vestigial organs which are of common occurrence in animals; most of them are neither here nor there; they are not even expensive to keep up; they are negligible survivals like the unsounded letters in many words, like the “ o ” in leopard or the “b ” in doubt. The whale is not burdened by its deeplyburied vestigial hip-girdle and hindlegs, and there is no reason to believe that the unborn whalebone whale is put about by the persistence of two sets of vestigial teeth which never cut the gum. Belies of the past are apt to vary in a curious way, and they may become seats of disease, partly because they are out of the current of healthfulness; but in most cases they are practically unimportant—just straws showing how the evolution-wind has blown.

In man there are some of these more or less anachronistic structures. Thus it is often stated by some of those who ought to know that man would lie a healthier creature if he had no vermiform appendix. lie certainly seems to get on very well without it. It is often stated —we like to be cautious about these matters —that man’s food-canal, about thirty feet, is far too long. It was adapted for days when the food was coarse and poor, and when the meals were very unpunctual—when, in short, man had to eat large quantities. Especially is the length of the large intestine regarded as an anachronism in these days of condensed highly nutritious food and regular meals. It is out of date. Then there are the wisdom teeth or third molars, which are often late in appearing and of little use. They are often more trouble than they are worth. They are part of our complement of thirty-two teeth, inherited from prehuman ancestors, which have become overcrowded in man owing to the obvious shortening down of the region of the snout. It may be, however, that it is hypercritical to speak of our wisdom teeth as anachronisms; for if they had anything to do with wisdom, we never needed them more than now. Another kind of anachronism has to do with function. It occasionally happens "that an old-fashioned way of doing something persists as an aberration. This usually spells disease, for instance, in the excretory system; and it finds few illustrations except in man. It must be distinguished from imperfections that result from arrest of development, such as hare-lip or a slight lack of finish in the heart. It would be interesting to inquire whether the imperfect warm-bloodedness of some mammals, notably the hibernators, was an arrest of development, for the newborn mammal is often, though not always, very cold-blooded; or whether it was sometimes a persistent reptilian anachronism. The second interpretation is suggested in the case of the two old-fashioned egg-laying mammals, the duckmole and the spiny ant-eater, both very imperfectly warm-blooded.

Anachronisms are familiar in domesticated animals, as in the shying horse or in the dog that turns round and round in the imaginary herbage of the hearthrug. Some of the ways of children, that are often misunderstood, are just anachronisms, as .may be illustrated by the reassertion of desires for a primitive dietary. It is not in children only that anachronisms persist, for there are survivals of old types among those who have reached years of great discretion. Tennyson speaks of the ape and tiger within us, and another poet confessed that he was stuccoed all over with quadrupeds. The robber baron is with us still in “all the ranks of society,”

and the patriarchate survives in many a household. No one who has not been a-shootin’ or a-fishin’ can regard poaching as a serious moral offence; it is only an anachronism. But we are afraid to pursue this line of thought. It should be noted, however, that it is bad biology to think of these ancient strands in our personality as persisting in their primaval simioid or tigroid or neanderthaloid texture. The organism is a unity, and is always making itself a unity afresh; the ancient strands, though often so liable to knot, have all been in some measure humanised.

No doubt there are anachronistic occupations and professions. The “ worm-eaters ” who make new furniture look old must surely be anachronisms, if the word means anything; and the quack is an anachronism in those days when there are so many good doctors unemployed. Even lecturing is in no small degree an anachronism in its attempt to ignore the invention of printing. In his work on the “ Ancien Regime ” Taine gives a list of honorary or supernumerary posts at tiie Court of Versailles, such as the Steward of the Royal Hunt, who had no duties save signing his name twice a year. It would be an anachronism to suppose that there are no anachronisms in our midst to-day.

It would be of high value to make an index expurgatorius of anachronistic forms of speech that confuse issues and dull clear thinking. We mean mischievous anachronisms such as the withering retort when an uncomfortable puncturing fact is adduced—Oh, but that’s the exception that proves the rule. But even worse than forms of speech that have drifted from their old moorings are anachronisms of thought and action. Thus indiscriminate almsgiving and dysgenic parentage are anachronisms of conduct, and antievolutionist argument is an anachronism of thought. But saddest of all in personal experience is the first glimpse one gets of the fact that one has oneself become an anachronism!