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They feel they are champions of what is most precious in the world, as a sentimental lady might fancy herself a lover of flowers when she pressed them in a book instead of planting their seeds in the garden. It is clear that gratuitous and functionless habits cannot bring happiness; they do not constitute an activity at once spontaneous and beneficent, such as noble art is an instance of.
Those habits may indeed give pleasure; they may bring extreme excitement, as madness notably does, though it is in the highest degree functionless and gratuitous. Nor is such by-play without consequences, some of which might conceivably be fortunate. What is functionless is so called for being worthless from some ideal point of view, and not conducing to the particular life considered.
Either they have done service in the past, or they may do service in the future. They may have been essentially useful in one way in a past species, and, though now functionless, they may be turned to useful account in some very different way hereafter. In botany several cases come to our mind which suggest such interpretation.
The only conclusion that can reasonably be drawn from this strange fact is that we are here dealing with a fossilized structure, a functionless survival. It leads irresistibly to the inference that man has descended from a quadruped ancestor, and that when his body took the upright position the structure of the veins, not being seriously detrimental, remained unchanged.
It is evident that, according to the theory of natural selection, these batteries could not have been preserved through their long functionless and useless stages, for that theory assumes that they were preserved because they were useful.
One chief cause seems to be that the ancient races stand somewhat nearer in the long line of descent to their remote animal-like progenitors. In man, the os coccyx, together with certain other vertebrae hereafter to be described, though functionless as a tail, plainly represent this part in other vertebrate animals. Quatrefages has lately collected the evidence on this subject.
In the Homoptera, also, the females have the proper musical apparatus in a functionless state; and we shall hereafter meet in other divisions of the animal kingdom with many instances of structures proper to the male being present in a rudimentary condition of the female.
We are accustomed to hear design doubted on account of certain failures of provision, waste of resources, or functionless condition of organs; but it is refreshingly new to have the very harmony itself of man with his surroundings, and the completeness of provision for his wants and desires, brought up as a refutation of the validity of the argument for design.
The evidence in the notorious Thaw trial, after one has discounted its theatrical elements, was still a very convincing demonstration of a rotten and extravagant, because aimless and functionless, class of rich people. But one has to be careful in this matter if one is to do justice to the facts.
In a sense it includes several modern royalties, for the crown in several modern constitutional states is a corporation sole, and the monarch the unique, unlimited, and so far as necessity goes, quite functionless shareholder.
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