82 Original Articles. [ Jan. 
influence of agencies whose nature constitutes a proper object of 
scientific inquiry, that most general form in which the fabric—whether 
Corporeal or Social—originates, evolves itself into that most special in 
which its development culminates. 
But notwithstanding the wonderful diversity of structure and 
of endowments which we meet with in the study of any complex Orga- 
nism, we encounter a harmonious unity or co-ordination in its entire 
aggregate of actions, which is yet more wonderful. Itis this harmony 
or co-ordination, whose tendency is to the conservation of the organism, 
that the state of Health or Normal Life essentially consists. And the 
more profound our investigation of its conditions, the more definite 
becomes the conclusion to which we are led by the study of them,— 
that it is fundamentally based on the common origin of all these diver- 
sified parts in the same germ, the vital endowments of which, equally 
diffused throughout the whole fabric in those lowest forms of organiza- 
tion in which every part is but a repetition of every other, are differen- 
tiated in the highest amongst a variety of organs, acquiring in virtue 
of this differentiation a much greater intensity. 
Thus, then, we may take that mode of Vital Activity which mani- 
fests itself in the evolution of the germ into the complete organism 
repeating the type of its parent, and the subsequent maintenance of 
that organism in its integrity,—in the one case, as in the other, at the 
expense of materials derived from external sources,—as the most uni- 
versal and most fundamental characteristic of Life; and we have now 
to consider the nature and source of the Force or Power by which that 
evolution is brought about. The prevalent opinion has until lately 
been, that this power is inherent in the germ ; which has been supposed 
to derive from its parent not merely its material substance, but a nisus 
formativus, Bildungstrieb, or germ-force, in virtue of which it builds itself 
up into the likeness of its parent, and maintains itself in that likeness 
until the force is exhausted, at the same time imparting a fraction of 
it to each of its progeny. In this mode of viewing the subject, all the 
organizing force required to build up an Oak or a Palm, an Elephant 
or a Whale, must be concentrated in a minute particle, only discernible 
by microscopic aid; and the aggregate of all the germ-forces apper- 
taining to the descendants, however numerous, of 2 common parentage, 
must have existed in their original progenitors. Thus, in the case of 
the successive viviparous broods of Aphides, a germ-force capable of 
organizing a mass of living structure, which would amount (it has 
been calculated)* in the tenth brood to the bulk of 500 millions of 
stout men, must have been shut up in the single individual, weighing 
perhaps the 1-1000th of a grain, from which the first brood was evolved. 
And in like manner, the germ-force which has organized the bodies 
of all the individual men that have lived from Adam to the present 
day, must have been concentrated in the body of their common ancestor. 
A more complete reductio ad absurdum can scarcely be brought against 
any hypothesis; and we may consider it proved that, in some way or 
* See Prof. Huxley on the “Agamie Reproduction of Aphis,” in ‘Linn. Trans.,’ 
vol, xxii. p. 215. 
