Law of Proenvironment 239 



years are too decisive and indicative to cause serious doubt 

 that new impressions or stimuli give rise to new and exact 

 lines of energy-flow, that bear along and locate material particles 

 in new relation to such as formerly existed, and which confer 

 thereby new proenvironal capacities on the organism. 



To reach such a result we do not necessarily need to assume 

 the formation of any new substances. A more advantageous 

 placing or linking together of already formed material, or a 

 steady increase in the amount and complexity of connection 

 throughout that material, owing to environal stimulation and 

 proenvironal response, would amply explain the formation 

 of new tendencies, habits, and instincts. Moreover, structural 

 details are evidently steadily established, so as to extend the 

 spheres of action and reaction. For, as C. L. Herrick (92: 23) 

 has pointed out, accessory cells surrounding nerve endings 

 may take up and distribute currents of energy from the nerves. 

 Thus he says, speaking of some Amphibia and reptiles: "A 

 nervous end-organ is so connected ^-ith a meshwork of vast 

 extent as to suggest a very extensive somatic influence of a 

 nature similar to nervous reaction over vast tissue areas." 



The gradual evolution then among metazoans of an increas- 

 ingly more complex nervous system, as these animals increased 

 in size and in time passed from an aquatic to a land life, was 

 necessary. So correlating sensory-motor areas or clusters of 

 nerve cells, that formed brain masses, became steadily en- 

 larged and subdivided into sense-correlating and memory 

 centers. These permitted more and more complicated inflows 

 of varied kinds of energy from without; the transformation 

 of these into discrete currents of bio-cognitic energy, and later, 

 when linked up through passage into the nerve cells, of cogitic 

 energy. This again, through complicated interlinking of 

 molecules in the nerve cells, might produce efferent lines of 

 cogitic energy-flow, that would start definite proenvironal 

 responses. 



So, by extremely slow but steadily progressive multipli- 

 cation, interconnection, and condensation of nerve cells, such 

 brain centers originated and were built up gradually as have 



