100 THE CRITERIA OF LIVINGNESS 



tion and variation. There is a change wrought on the body 

 by some peculiarity of nurture, environment, or habit. That 

 is a modification, and, so far as we are aware, it is not 

 transmissible in itself or in any representative degree. So 

 this does not help us. There are also variations which 

 consist in the loss of some ancestral character, such as horns 

 or a tail, and we know that there are opportunities in the 

 history of the germ-cells for the dropping out of hereditary 

 items. There are also variations which consist in new 

 arrangements of ancestral characters, as when the progeny 

 of black and yellow rabbits are grey. Many apparently 

 novel features are just old characters in new guise. This 

 again is not difficult to understand in a general way. But 

 the kind of variation before which we are dumb is the 

 brusque origin of something distinctively novel, a new pat- 

 tern, an originality. And unless one is to make the assump- 

 tion that every character was given in the first organisms 

 and that evolution is only unrolling, time counting for 

 nothing, we are bound to assmne that these momentous 

 new departures have been of frequent occurrence all down 

 the ages. Our suggestion meanwhile is simply an assump- 

 tion that organisms are essentially creative. Even the in- 

 organic has a tendency to complexify ; a fortiori the organic. 

 The chemist is always turning out new carbon-compounds, 

 the organism is an unconsciously inventive chemist. The 

 same chemical substance can sometimes crystallise in more 

 than one way — we know the variety of snow crystals — so, 

 but with infinitely more subtlety, may the germ-cell experi- 

 ment with its own architecture, or trade with its environment 

 in adventurous differentiation. Just as an intact organism 

 from the Amoeba to the Elephant tries experiments, so the 

 germ-cell, which is no ordinary cell, but an implicit organism, 



