228 THE HISTORY OF CREATION. 



tliat organic individuals experience transformations and 

 assume forms in consequence of changes of nutrition which 

 have not operated on them themselves, but upon their 

 parental organism. The transforming influence of the 

 external conditions of existence, of climate, of nutrition, 

 etc., shows its effects here not directly in the transform- 

 ation of the organism itself, but indirectly in that of its 

 descendants. (Gen. Morph. ii. 202.) 



As the principal and most universal of the laws of in- 

 direct variation must be mentioned the law of indi- 

 vidual adaptation, or the important proposition that all 

 oro^anic individuals from the commencement of their indi- 

 vidual existence are unequal, although often very much 

 alike. As a proof of this proposition, I may at once point 

 to the fact, tJiat in the human race in general all brothers 

 and sisters, all children of the same parents, are unequal 

 from their birth. No one will venture to assert that two 

 children at their birth are perfectly alike : that the size of 

 the individual parts of their bodies, the number of hairs on 

 their heads, the number of cells composing their outer skins 

 or epidermis, the number of blood-cells are the same in both 

 children, or that both children have come into the world 

 with the same abilities or talents. But what more specially 

 proves this law of individual difference, is the fact that in 

 the case of those animals which produce several young ones 

 at a time, — for instance, dogs and cats, — all the young of 

 each birth differ from one another more or less strikingly 

 in size and colour of the individual parts of the body, or 

 in strength, etc. Now this law is universal. All organic 

 individuals from their beginning are distinguished by cer- 

 tain, though often extremely minute, differences, and the 



