100 THE ARREST OF THE BODY. 



The Man, the Animal Man, the Man of Organic Evo- 

 lution, it is at least certain, will not go on. It is 

 another Man who will go on, a Man within this Man ; 

 and that he may go on the first Man must stop= Let 

 us try for a moment to learn what it is to stop. 

 Nothing could teach Man better what is meant by 

 his going on. 



One of the most perfect pieces of mechanism in the 

 human body is the Hand. How long it has taken to 

 develop may be dimly seen by a glance at the long 

 array of less accurate instruments of prehension 

 which shade away with ever decreasing delicacy and 

 perfectness as we descend the scale of animal life. At 

 the bottom of that scale is the Amoeba. It is a speck 

 of protoplasmic jelly, headless, footless, and armless. 

 When it wishes to seize the microscopic particle of 

 food on which it lives a portion of its body lengthens 

 out, and, moving towards the object, flows over it, en- 

 gulfs it, and melts back again into the body. This 

 is its Hand. At any place, and at any moment, it 

 creates a Hand. Each Hand is extemporized as it is 

 needed ; when not needed it is not. Pass a little 

 higher up the scale and observe the Sea-Anemone. 

 The Hand is no longer extemporized as occasion re- 

 quires, but lengthened portions of the body are set 

 apart and kept permanently in shape for the purpose 

 of seizing food. Here, in the capital of twining ten- 

 tacles which crowns the quivering pillar of the body, 

 we get the rude approximation to the most useful por- 

 tion of the human Hand — the separated fingers. It is 

 a vast improvement on the earlier Hand, but the 

 jointless digits are still imperfect ; it is simply the 

 Amoeba Hand cut into permanent strips. 



