CHAPTER I. 



GROWTH. 



43. PERHAPS the widest and most familiar induction of 

 Biology, is that organisms grow. While, however, this is a 

 characteristic so uniformly and markedly displayed by plants 

 and animals, as to be carelessly thought peculiar to them, 

 it is really not so. Under appropriate conditions, increase of 

 size takes place in inorganic aggregates, as well as in organic 

 aggregates. Crystals grow; and often far more rapidly than 

 living bodies. Where the requisite materials are supplied in 

 the requisite forms, growth may be witnessed in non-crystal- 

 line masses: instance the fungous-like accumulation of 

 carbon that takes place on the wick of an urisnuffed candle. 

 On an immensely larger scale, we have growth in geologic 

 formations : the slow accumulation of deposited sediment into 

 a stratum, is not distinguishable from growth in its. widest 

 acceptation. And if we go back to the genesis of celestial 

 bodies, assuming them to have arisen by Evolution, these, 

 too, must have gradually passed into their concrete shapes 

 through processes of growth. Growth is, indeed, as being an 

 integration of matter, the primary trait of Evolution; and if 

 Evolution of one kind or other is universal, growth is uni- 

 versal universal, that is, in the sense that all aggregates 

 display it in some way at some period. 



The essential community of nature between organic 

 growth and inorganic growth, is, however, most clearly seen 

 on observing that they both result in the same way. The 

 segregation of different kinds of detritus from each other, as 



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