CHAPTER XIV 

 THE PURPOSE OF YOUTH 



ALTHOUGH it was not my intention in writing this book or in prepar- 

 ing the lectures on which it was founded to construct a carefully 

 considered and elaborate argument, I have tried to develop a general 

 idea and to illustrate it by selecting appropriate instances from 

 the abounding variety of nature. The period of childhood or youth 

 is peculiar to the living world and occurs, in the first place, merely 

 because most living things do not come into existence as fully 

 formed creatures like their parents, but as little specks of living 

 matter much more like the earliest forms of life that existed. It 

 has taken countless centuries for the living species of animals and 

 plants to evolve from the primitive forms of living beings, and yet 

 in each generation each new individual has to repeat the prodigious 

 process of changing from the minute cell known as the egg-cell, 

 which is separated from the tissues of its parent, to the complicated 

 adult body, often composed of myriads of cells, with different struc- 

 tures and functions, and built up into the elaborate architecture 

 of the adult. One of the little grains, of which you see thousands 

 in the hard roe of a herring, would presently have been shed into 

 sea-water, met and fused with another little speck of matter, but 

 so small that you cannot distinguish it without the aid of a micro- 

 scope, from the soft roe of another herring, would have absorbed 

 moisture and oxygen from the sea-water, and would have grown 

 visibly bigger, until presently it burst and gave birth to a minute 

 fish-like creature still very unlike a herring. This tiny transparent 

 living thing would have fed eagerly on still tinier specks of living 

 matter in the water, and in course of time, if it itself escaped being 

 eaten, would have turned to a swift and scaly fish, with a brain 

 and muscles, gills and red blood. The egg of a hen would seem 

 to have a task that is a little easier, for the little speck of living 

 matter inside the eggshell is packed round and round with rich 

 food, but the transformation of the liquid stuff that we see when 

 we break open a new-laid egg into the warm and feathered, hungry 



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