MR. MARTINEAU ON EVOLUTION. 317 



are as actively locomotive as the minute creatures classed as animals 

 seen along with them ; and among these lowest types of living things 

 it is common for the life to be now predominantly animal and presently 

 to become predominantly vegetal. The very name zoospores, given to 

 germs of algce, which for a while swim about actively by means of cilia, 

 and presently settling down grow into plant-forms, is given because of 

 this conspicuous community of nature. So complete is this community 

 of nature that for some time past many naturalists have wished to 

 establish for these lowest types a sub-kingdom intermediate between 

 the animal and the vegetal : the reason against this course being, how- 

 ever, that the difficulty crops up afresh at any assumed places where 

 this intermediate sub-kingdom may be supposed to join the other two. 

 Thus the assumption on which Mr. Martineau proceeds is diametrically 

 opposed to the conviction of naturalists in general. 



Though I do not perceive that it is specifically stated, there appears 

 to be tacitly implied a fourth difficulty of an allied kind the difficulty 

 that there is no possibility of transition from life of the simplest kind to 

 mind. Mr. Martineau says, indeed, that there can be " with only vital 

 resources, as in the vegetal world, no beginning of mind ; " appar- 

 ently leaving it to be inferred that in the animal world the resources 

 are such as to make the "beginning of mind" comprehensible. 

 "Whether any consciousness of an incongruity between the conception 

 of " germs of mind as well as the inferior elements," and his hypoth- 

 esis of universal mind as the cause of evolution, prevented Mr. Mar- 

 tineau from pressing this objection, I do not know. But, had he 

 asserted a chasm between mind and bodily life, for which there is cer- 

 tainly quite as much reason as for asserting a chasm between animal 

 life and vegetal life, the difficulties in his way would have been no less 

 insuperable. For those lowest forms of irritability in the animal king- 

 dom, which, I suppose, Mr. Martineau refers to as the " beginning of 

 mind," are not distinguishable from the irritability which plants dis- 

 play : they in no greater degree imply consciousness. If the sudden 

 folding of a sensitive-plant's leaf when touched, or the spreading out of 

 the stamens in a cistus-fiower when you brush them, is to be con- 

 sidered as a vital action of a purely physical kind, then so too must be 

 considered the equally slow retraction of a polype's tentacles. And 

 yet, from this simple motion of an animal having no nervous system, 

 we may pass by insensible stages through ever-complicating forms of 

 actions, with their accompanying signs of feeling and intelligence, 

 until we reach the highest. Even apart from the evidence derived 

 from the ascending grades of animals up from zoophytes, as they are 

 significantly named, it needs only to observe the evolution of a single 

 animal to see how baseless is the assumption that there exists any 

 break or chasm between the life that shows no mind and the life that 

 shows mind. The yolk of an egg which the cook has just broken not 

 only yields no sign of mind,"but yields no sign of life. It does not re- 



