BENEVOLENCE AND DISCIPLINE 139 



the gift of cosmic agencies to life. To these previously 

 prepared habitats, and their prescribed order, life must 

 conform all its activities, and from their resources de- 

 rive all its materials and forces. 



2. The Germ, or the Entailed Principal of Life. 

 These estates are the parental and racial germ-plas- 

 mas, or chromosomes, or whatever they may be, which 

 constitute the more stable organic basis of life. Each 

 life receives them, ready made, from a long line of 

 ancestors, shelters and husbands them temporarily, 

 and then gives them up, reimpressed, to posterity. They 

 are the immortal, vital sparks, tended by mortal fires, 

 which ultimately leave the parent body and, reen- 

 kindled by cooperative union with one another, initiate 

 a redirected life. 



In the higher animals, the larger part of this ger- 

 minal material is doubtless of the same physical and 

 chemical nature as that which has been the common 

 heritage of animal life for many millions of years. Its 

 constructive power has been gradually enlarged by 

 successive changes, additions, or improvements, and 

 each enlargement has become definitely stabilized, in 

 the sense that under widely different conditions it al- 

 ways grows up, if at all, in very much the same ways, 

 and produces the same kind of things as those from 

 which it came, with, it may be, something more. 



The germ plasma of the human egg, for example, 

 is man's heritage from the whole gamut of animal lives. 

 It is very largely the product of their fostering care, 

 and at every stage of its growth into a human being it 

 bears the stamp of their impressions. It always grows 

 into a living thing, at first fundamentally like all other 

 living things; and then in its further up-growth takes 



