THE EVOLUTION PROCESS 245 



able ones, nor even among a more limited 

 number of ancestral possibilities, but as so 

 many forms thrown from the rhythmic 

 oscillation of the loom of life. Each of these 

 types or species, with its exquisite intricacy 

 of detail and individuality of pattern, its 

 marvellous correlation of organs, is thus a 

 new unity created from within by its own 

 interior play and balance of vegetative and 

 reproductive forces, its inner predominances 

 here of anabolisms and there of katabolisms. 

 Growth and arrest, giant and dwarf, rest 

 and movement, sleep and waking, even fe- 

 male, and male are contrasts all physiologi- 

 cally akin; and this single and simple rhythm 

 of metabolisms, of passivities and activities 

 goes on into compound and recompounding 

 rhythms, like the figures of the pendulo- 

 graph. The forms of life are thus distinct 

 and definite, because harmoniously unified. 

 They have a certain stability, great or small, 

 yet they are anew transformable, like musical 

 variations, like singing flames. Thus from 

 within are spun and woven and shaped the 

 manifold garments of Life, always simple, 

 though ever more and more Protean. Our 

 clue to the secret of variational evolution 

 thus holds good, is one and the same from 

 the ancient contrast of plant and animal up 

 through the great lifts of evolution, and down 



