A STUDY OF LOWER LIFE. 69 



you get is altogether different. Here you never for a single 

 day or hour keep firm possession of what you once had. 

 Here there is never-resting mutation. What you now have 

 is no sooner reached, than it begins to slip away from your 

 grasp. One form of existence comes into being only to be 

 abolished and obliterated by that which succeeds it. Seed 

 or germ, peeping bud, rising stem, leaf and blossom, flower 

 and fruit, are things that do not continue side by side as 

 part of a permanent store, but each owes its present exist- 

 ence to the annulling of that which was before. You cannot 

 possess at one and the same time the tender grace of the 

 vernal woods and the rich profusion of colour and blossom 

 of the later growth of summer ; and if you are ever to gather 

 in the fruit, for that you must be content that the gay blos- 

 soms should shrivel up and drop- away. Yet though, in 

 organic development you cannot retain the past, it is not 

 destroyed or annihilated. In a deeper way than by actual 

 matter-of-fact presence and preservation, it continues. 

 Each present phase of the living organism has in it the vital 

 result of all that it has been. The past is gone, but the 

 organism could not have become what it is without the past. 

 Every bygone moment of its existence still lives in it, not 

 indeed as it was, but absorbed, transformed, worked up into 

 the essence of its new and higher being. And when the 

 perfection of the organism is reached, the unity of the per- 

 fectly developed life is one which gathers up into itself, not 

 by juxtaposition or summation, but in a far deeper way, the 

 concentrated results of all its bygone history. And by how 

 much life is nobler than dead matter, by so much are the 

 results and fruits of life the manifestation of a nobler kind of 

 progress than that which is got by the accumulation of things 

 which are at once permanent and lifeless, and permanent 

 because they are lifeless." 



The hydra equally with the higher animal, and the low- 

 liest plant equally with the lordly oak, presents the distinc- 

 tions and differences thus forcibly expressed as existing 

 between living and non-living matter. There is thus a con- 



