290 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



territory; it jDlanted a colony. The coast of Asia Minor was colo- 

 nized from the Greek mainland and the islands of the archipelago; 

 the whole country would nowadays be annexed by a conquering 

 power as the spoil of a single battle and permanently occupied; but 

 it was successively settled by twelve Ionic and twelve /F.olic colonies, 

 each of them independent, with conterminous territories. A Greek 

 colony grew in the same way. ISTaxos or Syracuse, on the Sicilian 

 coast, might, either of them, have annexed the strip of territory 

 between them; they colonized it. A Greek city, like a hydra, was 

 incapable of expanding beyond a certain point; when that point 

 was reached the mass broke and gave birth to a new city. Greece 

 seems never to have got beyond the city stage of national develop- 

 ment. Roman colonies were at first of the same character. They 

 were planted in conquered territory, to hold it for Rome, and had a 

 certain independence; as the intervening space between Rome and 

 the colony was occupied by Roman citizens, the colony became con- 

 tinuous with the city and formed part of an undivided empire. So 

 does every nation advance over its own territory. Each new clearing 

 in the surrounding forest is the seat of a colony. The trapper and 

 fur trader of the early days in ISTorth America were continually 

 founding stations ever farther in the interior, which proved the 

 nuclei of fresh settlement. The pioneer squatter of Australia is 

 still moving into untrodden regions. Such colonies are like gTasses, 

 which are sown by the wind in a myiiad separate plants, but become 

 contiguous and form the carpeted turf. As reproduction is discon- 

 tinuous growth, colonization is discontinuous expansion. 



Growth is everywhere limited by the constitution of the organism ; 

 beyond a certain size the mass of cells can not be governed from a 

 common center. The limit attained, the augmentation takes on the 

 form and structure of the parent, and, thinning away at the point of 

 junction, a new individual is launched into space. This is the form 

 of reproduction proper to the lower half of organic creation — to 

 invertebrate animals and the more lowly forms of plants. It is non- 

 sexual, for it is produced neither by sexual individuals nor by sepa- 

 rate sexual organs in the same individual, nor by the union of differ- 

 entiated cells. It takes place in unicellular organisms, like the 

 protozoa, by the rupture of the unit mass of protoplasm. Higher 

 species, like sponges or hydras, protrude buds at any point or all 

 round, which often remain connected with' the parent. Or there 

 may be an outflow at a single point successively repeated. The bud 

 may be of all sizes, but is usually less than the parent; in rare cases 

 it is equally large. 



The earliest forms of colonization answer in all respects to 

 asexual reproduction. The Phoenician and Greek cities were units; 



