than we can account for. We can very readily stop eating or
drinking, and can follow our own action without difficulty in either
process; but, as regards swallowing, which is the earlier habit, we
have less power of self-analysis and control: when we have once
committed ourselves beyond a certain point to swallowing, we must
finish doing so,--that is to say, our control over the operation
ceases. Also, a still smaller experience seems necessary for the
acquisition of the power to swallow than appeared necessary in the
case of eating; and if we get into a difficulty we choke, and are
more at a loss how to become introspective than we are about eating
and drinking.

Why should a baby be able to swallow--which one would have said was
the more complicated process of the two--with so much less practice
than it takes him to learn to eat? How comes it that he exhibits in
the case of the more difficult operation all the phenomena which
ordinarily accompany a more complete mastery and longer practice?
Analogy would certainly seem to point in the direction of thinking
that the necessary experience cannot have been wanting, and that,
too, not in such a quibbling sort as when people talk about inherited
habit or the experience of the race, which, without explanation, is
to plain-speaking persons very much the same, in regard to the
individual, as no experience at all, but bona fide in the child's own
person.

Breathing, again, is an action acquired after birth, generally with
some little hesitation and difficulty, but still acquired in a time
seldom longer, as I am informed, than ten minutes or a quarter of an
hour. For an ant which has to be acquired at all, there would seem
here, as in the case of eating, to be a disproportion between, on the