142 LIFE AND HABIT. 



kitchen shelf twelve months ago," as to say to a man, 

 " you are the child whom I remember thirty years ago 

 in your mother's arms." In either case we mean, " you 

 have been continually putting other organisms into 

 a false position, and then assimilating them, ever since 

 I last saw you, while nothing has yet occurred to put 

 you into such a false position as to have made you lose 

 the memory of your antecedents." 



It would seem perfectly fair, therefore, to say to any 

 egg of the twelve, or to the two fowls and the whole 

 twelve eggs together, "you were a couple of eggs 

 twelve months ago ; twelve months before that you 

 were four eggs ; " and so on, ad infinitum, the number 

 neither of the ancestors nor of the descendants counting 

 for anything, and continuity being the sole thing looked 

 to. From daily observation we are familiar with the 

 fact that identity does both unite with other identities, 

 so that a single new identity is the result, and does 

 also split itself up into several identities, so that the 

 one becomes many. This is plain from the manner 

 in which the male and female sexual elements unite to 

 form a single ovum, which we observe to be instinct 

 with the memories of both the individuals from which 

 it has been derived ; and there is the additional con- 

 sideration, that each of the elements whose fusion goes 

 to make up the impregnate ovum, is held by some to 

 be itself composed of a fused mass of germs, which 

 stand very much in the same relation to the sperma- 

 tozoon and ovum, as the living cellular units of which 

 we are composed do to ourselves — that is to say, are 

 living independent organisms, which probably have no 



