54 HOLISM AND EVOLUTION chap. 



this globe and is yet in the heyday of its growth and increase. 

 As yet it recognises no limit or barrier in its first flush of 

 youth. It spends with a lavish prodigality, which is in strik- 

 ing contrast to the frugality and conservatism of matter, 

 for which the laws of Conservation and of Least Action have 

 become the last word of wisdom and the unbroken rule of 

 action. But then matter is old, old as the beginning, so old 

 that its wrinkles are the fundamental curves of the Space- 

 Time universe. Life has only just begun, since the yester- 

 day of Eozoic times, in the upbuilding of its new forms 

 and types, and in this task it can proceed for millions of 

 years to come. Matter, on the contrary, had completed 

 its active race probably more than a thousand million years 

 before life began. It had built up slowly and laboriously 

 in nebular and solar heat, and amid conditions beyond the 

 possibility of our knowledge or imagination, the elements 

 from their simplest to their most complex forms, and from 

 these again substances and compounds in rising complexity 

 until at last protoplasm was reached. And in the favouring 

 bosom of protoplasm life could be nurtured from its simple 

 chemical beginnings and launched on its great career, most 

 of which is still before it. The work of matter is done; in 

 the great Space-Time curve it is now regressing from the 

 more complex to the simpler types or elements, just as in 

 organic Evolution we see a tendency for the most highly 

 evolved and differentiated types to hark back for stability 

 to simpler and stronger types. Radioactivity is doing to- 

 I day what Organic Descent (when it will indeed have become 

 a descent) will do in the fullness of its time, when Life's 

 spirit of adventure will have abated, and its aim will be 

 safety and conservation rather than progress. 



When all allowance has been made for the differences in 

 character and operation of Radioactivity and Organic 

 Descent, there still remains a striking and unmistakable 

 similarity between them. And between the Periodic Table 

 of Chemistry on the one hand and Systematic Botany and 

 Zoology on the other there remains something very much 

 like a family resemblance. The concepts of orders, genera 



