308 DARWINISM STATED BY DARWIN HIMSELF. 



on multiplying for a much longer period than others. 

 Finally, on the view here given, we certainly gain some 

 insight into the wonderful fact that the child may depart 

 from the type of both its parents, and resemble its grand- 

 parents, or ancestors removed by many hundreds of gen- 

 erations. 



The child, strictly speaking, does not grow 

 into the man, but includes germs which slowly 

 and successively become developed and form the man. 

 In the child, as well as in the adult, each part generates 

 the same part. Inheritance must be looked at as merely 

 a form of growth, like the self -division of a lowly-organ- 

 ized unicellular organism. Eeversion depends on the 

 transmission from the forefather to his descendants of 

 dormant gemmules, which occasionally become developed 

 under certain known or unknown conditions. Each 

 animal and plant may be compared with a bed of soil 

 full of seeds, some of which soon germinate, some lie dor- 

 mant for a period, while others perish. When we hear 

 it said that a man carries in his constitution the seeds of 

 an inherited disease, there is much truth in the expression. 

 No other attempt, as far as I am aware, has been made, 

 imperfect as this confessedly is, to connect under one 

 point of view these several grand classes of facts. An 

 organic being is a microcosm — a little universe, formed 

 of a host of self-propagating organisms, inconceivably 

 minute and numerous as the stars in heaven. 



