Insectivores.

The critical territory of vertebrate, and still more of Mammalian forms, in which the genealogist pictures the five main groups of Insectivores, looking about them, if one may so speak, in the world around and pondering which of many paths they shall pursue, resembles certain centres that may be seen in towns where three, four, five, or seven different roads are open to the traveller, each with its incalculable effects on his ultimate career. If one may change here the metaphor it may be said that the Insectivores are the watershed of the Five Rivers of higher life. However much the wayfaring insect-feeders have diverged from this broad centre in structure, and however much the laws of genetics have widened this divergence, the facts of function stare one in the face when such descriptions of three of the four orders outside the Primate stock are pondered—Flesh-feeders, Herbivorous animals, Burrowers and Gnawers. These time-honoured names appealed strongly to older zoologists, and in them is implicit a large body of evidence for initiative in their evolution by pioneering work on the part of their ancestors. Though in these days Prototheria include Monotremes, One-vent animals, Metatheria, Marsupials or pouched animals, and Eutheria Insect-feeders, and though Mammals derive their indispensable name from the function by which they feed their young, the most severe of systematists cannot clear his mind from the old leaven of function in all these terms. They imply momentous potentialities prior to new structures, and the modern fails to ban entirely such functional names. I believe there is here no juggling with names and words on my part, but a stone in the founda­tion of the unambitious building which I am seeking to rear. It is ultimately connected with a directive power as well as the formation of sensori-motor arcs in the central nervous system.

Is it possible or probable that the factors which led some group to the water alone, some to a life in water and on land at different parts of their lives, some to a crawling life on land and partly in water, some to the air and trees, some to nocturnal, some to hybernating, some to burrowing life, some to a diet of flesh, some to one of plants, some to the trees alone, some to the trees and land, some to the land by night and trees by day, and some for ever and wholly to the land—is it probable that any process of selection of suited structures with countless ages of trial and error, could have determined these changes of habit and habitat? At least one may claim that the balance of probabilities is heavily against that view, and that the forging of reflex-arcs, with all it means to the career of an individual, affords a more intelligible hypothesis, and that this is strongly supported by modern discoveries and doctrines arising from the work of physiologists, as will appear later.