ASSIMILA TION OF OUTSIDE MA TTER. 147 



for it to do this, it is at no loss, as it would certainly be 

 if the position was unfamiliar, but it immediately 

 begins doing what it did when last it was in a like 

 case, repeating the process as nearly as the environ- 

 ment will allow, taking every step in the same order 

 as last time, and doing its work with that ease and 

 perfection which we observe to belong to the force of 

 habit, and to be utterly incompatible with any other 

 supposition than that of long long practice. 



Once having become a chrysalis, its memory of its 

 caterpillarhood appears to leave it for good and all, 

 not to return until it again assumes the shape of a 

 caterpillar by process of descent. Its memory now 

 overleaps all past modifications, and reverts to the 

 time when it was last what it is now, and though it 

 is probable that both caterpillar and chrysalis, on any 

 given day of their existence in either of these forms, 

 have some sort of dim power of recollecting what 

 happened to them yesterday, or the day before; yet it 

 is plain their main memory goes back to the corres- 

 ponding day of their last existence in their present 

 form, the chrysalis remembering what happened to it 

 on such a day far more practically, though less con- 

 sciously, than what happened to it yesterday; and 

 naturally, for yesterday is but once, and its past exist- 

 ences have been legion. Hence, it prepares its wings 

 in due time, doing each day what it did on the corres- 

 ponding day of its last chrysalishood, and at length 

 becoming a moth ; whereon its circumstances are so 

 changed that it loses all sense of its identity as a 

 chrysalis (as completely as we, for precisely the same 



