control of them; and we also build one habit and its corresponding
functional modification of our organs on another, and so become
dependent on our old habits. Consequently we have to persist in them
even when they hurt us. We cannot stop breathing to avoid an attack of
asthma, or to escape drowning. We can lose a habit and discard an organ
when we no longer need them, just as we acquired them; but this process
is slow and broken by relapses; and relics of the organ and the habit
long survive its utility. And if other and still indispensable habits
and modifications have been built on the ones we wish to discard, we
must provide a new foundation for them before we demolish the old one.
This is also a slow process and a very curious one.


THE MIRACLE OF CONDENSED RECAPITULATION

The relapses between the efforts to acquire a habit are important
because, as we have seen, they recur not only from effort to effort in
the case of the individual, but from generation to generation in the
case of the race. This relapsing from generation to generation is an
invariable characteristic of the evolutionary process. For instance,
Raphael, though descended from eight uninterrupted generations of
painters, had to learn to paint apparently as if no Sanzio had ever
handled a brush before. But he had also to learn to breathe, and digest,
and circulate his blood. Although his father and mother were fully grown
adults when he was conceived, he was not conceived or even born fully
grown: he had to go back and begin as a speck of protoplasm, and to
struggle through an embryonic lifetime, during part of which he was
indistinguishable from an embryonic dog, and had neither a skull nor a
backbone. When he at last acquired these articles, he was for some time
doubtful whether he was a bird or a fish. He had to compress untold