A STUDY OF LOWER LIFE. 



459 



to imitate the unselfish union of aims and ends 

 which a zoophyte colony exemplifies, or which 

 the vital mechanism of his own tissues illustrates. 

 When the political economist shall have succeed- 

 ed in inaugurating a scheme of human coopera- 

 tion for any purpose, on the successful model of 

 Nature's colonies in lower life, he will have good 

 cause to congratulate himself and his fellows on 

 having solved one of the paramount difficulties 

 which beset his day and generation. 



But, lastly, the true nature of the growth of 

 a living being can only be fully understood if we 

 for a moment compare that process with the 

 increase of a lifeless body. No better, truer, or 

 more eloquent description of the differences be- 

 tween the growth of the living and that of the 

 non-living could well be found than in the follow- 

 ing passages, culled from an essay, 1 by one of the 

 most liberal and advanced scholars of our day, 

 intended to illustrate the progressive nature of 

 philosophic science. " There is one kind of 

 progress," says the writer, " which consists sim- 

 ply of addition of the same to the same, or of 

 the external accumulation of materials. But in- 

 crease by addition, even though it be ordered or 

 regulated addition, is not the highest kind of ad- 

 vancement. Pile heap on heap of inorganic mat- 

 ter, and you have a result in which nothing is 

 changed ; the lowest stratum of the pile remains 

 to the last what it was at the first ; you keep all 

 you ever had in solid permanence. Add stone to 

 stone or brick to brick, till the house you have 

 built stands complete from foundation to cope- 

 stone ; and here, though in order and system 

 there may be a shadow of something higher than 

 mere quantity, there is still only addition without 

 progress. You have here also what the super- 

 ficial mind covets as the sign of value in its pos- 

 sessions — permanent results, solid and stable re- 

 ality. Every stone you place there remains to the 

 last cut, hewed, shaped, in all its hard external 

 actuality, what it was at the first ; and the whole 

 edifice, in its definite outward completeness, 

 stands, it may be, for ages, a permanent posses- 

 sion of the world. 



" But when you turn from inorganic accumu- 

 lation or addition of quantities to organic growth, 

 the kind of progress you get is altogether differ- 

 ent. Here you never for a single day or hour 

 keep firm possession of what you once had. 

 Here there is never-resting mutation. What you 

 now have is no sooner reached than it begins to 



i » Progressiveness of the Sciences ," by John Caird, 

 D. D., Principal of Glasgow University. Glasgow: Mac- 

 lehose, 1K75. 



slip away from your grasp. One form of exist- 

 ence comes into being only to be abolished and 

 obliterated by that which succeeds it. Seed or 

 germ, peeping bud, rising stem, leaf and blossom, 

 flower and fruit, are things that do not continue 

 side by side as part of a permanent store, but 

 each owes its present existence to the annulling 

 of that which was before. You cannot possess 

 at one and the same time the tender grace of the 

 vernal woods and the rich profusion of color and 

 blossom of the later growth of summer ; and if 

 you are ever to gather in the fruit, for that you 

 must be content that the gay blossoms should 

 shrivel up and drop away. Yet, though in or- 

 ganic development you cannot retain the past, it 

 is not destroyed or annihilated. In a deeper way 

 than by actual matter-of-fact presence and pres- 

 ervation, it continues. Each present phase of 

 the living organism has in it the vital result of 

 all that it has been. The past is gone, but the 

 organism could not have become what it is with- 

 out the past. Every by-gone moment of its exist- 

 ence still lives in it, not, indeed, as it was — but 

 absorbed, transformed, worked up into the es- 

 sence of its new and higher being. And when 

 the perfection of the organism is reached, the 

 unity of the perfectly-developed life is one which 

 gathers up into itself, not by juxtaposition or 

 summation, but in a far deeper way, the concen- 

 trated results of all its by-gone history. And by 

 how much life is nobler than dead matter, by so 

 much are the results and fruits of life the mani- 

 festation of a nobler kind of progress than that 

 which is got by the accumulation of things which 

 ar3 at once permanent and lifeless, and perma- 

 nent because they are lifeless." 



The hydra, equally with the higher animal, 

 and the lowliest plant equally with the lordly 

 oak, present the distinctions and differences thus 

 forcibly expressed as existing between living and 

 non-living matter. There is thus a constant re- 

 placement of old particles by new ones ; and this 

 change is not, after all, a mere replacement, but 

 also includes and carries with it a process of 

 growtli and increase — of which latter, as seen in 

 the living being, perhaps the most wonderful 

 feature is that whereby, amid all the constant 

 changes which living and being involve, the ani- 

 mal or plant should preserve and retain the 

 form in which it was, so to speak, originally 

 limned. 



A study of the denizens of a stagnant pool 

 may thus be shown to lead up, unconsciously it 

 may be, but also naturally, to some matters of 

 weighty consideration and interest, even to the 



