518 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Much evidence forces on the primitive man the notion that things 

 can change their forms as well as their substances. Did we not 

 thoughtlessly assume that truths which culture has made obvious to 

 us are naturally obvious, we should see that an unlimited belief in 

 metamorphosis is one which the savage cannot avoid. From early 

 childhood we hear remarks implying that certain transformations 

 which living things undergo are matters of course, while other trans- 

 formations are impossible. This distinction we suppose to have been 

 manifest at the outset. But, at the outset, the observed metamorphoses 

 suggest that any metamorphosis may occur. 



Consider the immense contrast in form as in substance between 

 the seed and the plant. Look at this nut with hard brown shell and 

 white kernel, and ask what basis there is for the expectation that from 

 it will presently come a soft shoot and green leaves. When young 

 we are told that the one grows into the other ; and, the blank form of 

 explanation being thus filled up, we cease to wonder and inquire. Yet, 

 it needs but to consider what thought would have arisen had there 

 been no one to give this mere verbal solution, to see that the thought 

 would have been transformation. Apart from hypothesis, the bare 

 fact is that a thing having one size, shape, and color, becomes a thing 

 having an utterly different size, shape, and color. 



Similarly with the eggs of birds. But a few days since this nest 

 contained four or five rounded, smooth, speckled bodies ; and now in 

 place of them are as many chicks gaping for food. We are brought 

 up to the idea that the eggs have been hatched ; and with this sem- 

 blance of interpretation we are content. This extreme change in 

 visible and tangible characters being recognized as one constantly 

 occurring in the order of Nature, is therefore regarded as not remark- 

 able. But to a mind occupied by no generalized experiences of its 

 own or of others, there would seem nothing more strange in the pro- 

 duction of chicks from nuts than in the production of chicks from 

 eggs : a metamorphosis of the kind we think impossible would stand 

 on the same footing as one which familiarity has made us think nat- 

 ural. Indeed, on remembering that there still survives, or till lately 

 survived, the popular belief that bai-nacle-geese arise from barnacles 

 on learning that, even in the early transactions of the Royal Society, 

 there is a paper describing a barnacle as showing faint traces of the 

 young bird it is about to produce it will be seen that only by ad- 

 vanced science has there been discriminated the natural organic trans- 

 formations, from transformations which to ignorance seem just as likely. 



The insect-world yields instances of metamorphoses even more 

 misleading. To a branch which shades the opening of his wigwam, 

 the savage saw, a few days ago, a caterpillar hanging with its head 

 downward. Now in the same place hangs a differently formed and 

 colored thing a chrysalis. In a week or two after there comes out 

 a butterfly : leaving a thin, empty case. These insect-metamorphoses, 



