THE BEGINNINGS OF LIFE. 1 1 1 



muscular and nervous elements may and do still live 

 for a time the nerve will conduct a stimulus under 

 which the muscle will contract ; and so is it, even 

 more markedly, with the epithelial cells those pos- 

 sessing cilia display their characteristic vital actions 

 long after the organism considered as a complex whole 

 has ceased to live. 



Now the lower we descend in the scale of living 

 things, the less marked does the life of the organism 

 as a whole become, in contradistinction to the life of 

 its several parts. The c tendency to individuation ' be- 

 comes less and less manifest in proportion as the struc- 

 tural differentiation diminishes. The more the several 

 parts of an organism resemble one another, the less 

 difference is there between the functions discharged 

 by these several parts, and therefore the importance, 

 is proportionately less to the whole organism when 

 one of these functions is interfered with. This is but 

 saying, in other words, that the machinery of Life grows 

 less and less complex, and that we are gradually ap- 

 proximating more and more to a state of things in 

 which, to employ the same simile, we have a mere 

 aggregate of wheels, a mere repetition of more or less 

 similar parts, with progressively less of mutual inter- 

 dependence between their several actions. Who has 

 not noticed the slowness with which a serpent dies, 

 how the toad clings to Life ? Look at the writhing 

 segment of the worm whose body has been cut by 

 the gardener's spade, or at the green Nereis of the 



