l6o ANDREWS. 



actions and interactions incidental to aggregate substance 

 organs, can become a race organ. Considering the strange 

 unlikeness between different phases of the same unit, and that 

 of sexes to each other ; the marvellous metamorphoses also 

 common ; the alternation of generations ; the single, dual, 

 triplex, or multiplex, relation of parent and offspring organisms 

 with their common and enormous differences ; the colonial and 

 social groupings of diverse creatures ; — the place of the unit 

 becomes, I think, unmistakably that of a certain organ of the 

 race substance, incidental to the race history of that substance. 

 Such structural and organic basis as has been used for group- 

 ing animals, now seems gross indeed when brought into con- 

 tact with true substance organs and structures. The difficulty 

 of understanding how organs which could not be of use to 

 the organism until already far advanced could be built up by 

 natural selection, is thus lessened, for they are to be thought of 

 first as substance organs and then as organism organs. And 

 their function in these two capacities may often be widely 

 different. We may know, it may be patent, how any group of 

 substance organs serves the organism as such, or acts in a 

 group of interrelations between its parts ; but we cannot be 

 therefore sure that we understand what part this organ plays in 

 the life history of the substance, especially as race substance. 

 Likeness of the adult offspring to the immediate parent was 

 so common a phenomenon in most accessible groups of beings 

 that it assumed at once in man's mind an undue importance 

 which it has ever since by tradition retained. It is rather 

 incidental than of prime importance except as a general 

 expression of certain broad recurrent groupings of substance 

 habit to form a race organ. A useful fact — and one that has in 

 general looked like a final fact when the history of units was 

 regarded — it has seemed indeed to be an end to which all the 

 wealth of power and adjustment known in the organism was 

 straining. To say that it is a natural and necessary result of 

 the fact that the same powers which formed the parent are in 

 operation at its birth, would be, I think, an inadequate state- 

 ment, for it may be a result of powers and processes which 

 were wholly or largely in abeyance when the parent was 



