15th Dec. Dr. Louis Robinson, in the November number of the Nineteenth Century, discusses under the title " Darwinism and Swimming: a Theory," the question which has often presented itself to swimmers, and even more strikingly to the unfortunates who try to learn to swim and never succeed unless they have one foot on the bottom ": da life-buoy close to them, why it is "that man has no inherent knowledge of how to swim, in spite of the immense period during hich such an accomplishment has been almost essential to him." It is generally believed nowadays that experience is inherited, and although we do not know very much about early man, we do know that he always lived near water as he did not know how to dig wells or canals, or store the rain in artificial reservoirs, he was obliged to live near water, and he must have been a swimmer, as all savages are at the present day. The palzolithic cave-dwellers hunted the mammoth and the reindeer in Britain and France at least, it is held, a hundred thousand years ago, and the more primitive men of the Wealden plateau are supposed to have ived three thousand centuries ago. "Now during all this vast epoch," says Dr. Robinson, "man has been a dweller by river banks or upon the margins of lakes and oceans; has been gathering his food from the sea, and pursuing his quarry seress mountain torrents or among the swamps and creeks of half-submerged deltas; has in many cases become semi-amphibions in his habits; and yet, in spite of the many thousand generations of experience of the dangers of immersion, he drowns at once in deep water, unless he has learnt a method of keeping himself afloat as entirely artificial as the act of skating or riding a bicycle."
On the other hand, every quadruped is able to swim in a measure without antecedent practice. "It would appear, since these animals exhibit a natural faculty which man has not,... that either a special instructive capacity for swimming has been conferred upon or acquired by them, from the benefits of which man has been excluded, or else the power must depend upon some other pristine instinct or faculty which has chanced to be adaptable for this purpose,.... which is present, and transferable for purposes of natation, quadrupeds, and absent, or not so transferable, in the case of man." Dr. Robinson goes on to show that the second supposition, and especially the last part of it, is correct. Quadrupeds swim without previous education because they use their limbs in the water in almost precisely the same manner and in the same general order as in terrestrial progression. If a young animal is caught up or frightened, its legs begin to at once as if it were trying to run) away, which is what it is instinctively trying to do; it is a common amusement to hold a puppy or kitten over water, and see it instantly begin "to swim" in the air, the attempt being really to run away. "And in the case of the more intelligent animals, should the presence of mind be lost through some shock or rush of emotion, so that they fall into a state of unreasoning panic,". the more adaptive ani rational method of using the limbs gives place to the instinctive mechanical method." Man, like other animals, when his reason' is overborne by any emotion, falls back on deeply-seated routine habits which are akin to the nature of instincts, In the case of a quadruped, when it is immersed beyond its depth, it walks in the water and, by good luck, finds the action. sufficient to bring it to land. Man, unfortunately, has given up walking on all-fours for an infinite number of generations, and therefore when he is Panic-track by finding himself out of his depth and in imminent danger of suffocation, he takes refuge in stinctive movements which are worse than useless for purposes of natation, and actually hasten his death.
Dr. Robivson goes on to give "an explanation both of mau's inability to swim without being taught, and of the character of his struggles when he is in danger of drowning." If man was at one time a quadruped, he soon became an arboreal animal, and the arboreal period of our racial existence must have been many times longer than the bipedal period; and we may assume "that any habitual act which has been of especial utility in preserving a race from extinction throughout a prolonged period is likely to occupy no unimportant place among the inherited instincts of derived species." 'I'he first impulse of all tree-climbing animals when they are frightened, is to scramble upwards to a place of safety. "Among arboreal quadrumanous creatures and their disfendants we should therefore expect to find scansorial movements resorted to without premeditation in moments of extreme panic, just as, among bewildered and terror-stricken _quadrupeds, running movements are mechan nicolly resorted to. 'I'his, I take it, is a probable reason why the drowning man struggles in a manner which is at once so characteristic, so senseless, and so disastrous. He acts exactly as if he were endeavouring to climb. His hands are alternately thrust, upwards, with open clutching fingers, as if to grasp something above his head, and his legs move in unison with his arms in the same way as do those of an ape which is mounting a tree, That is to say, the limbs on the same side are lifted coincidently, as they are when a sailor is going aloft. There is a remarkable uniformity in the behaviour of persons who cannot swim who find themselves suddenly immersed in deep water, which also strongly suggests that some instinctive tendency, inherent in, and possessed by, all human beings, is the prompter on such occasions. The unfortunate part of the matter is,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.