394 



ORGANIC GROWTH 



SEC. 



mechanical cause of the restoration of the mutilated organism 

 as a whole to its previous form. 



Ever-repeated inheritance not only causes every organism 

 to repeat in its individual development the directions of 

 growth by which its form is determined, but, even after that 

 development is completed, causes those directions of growth 

 to manifest themselves in the restoration of lost parts. For 

 recrescence not only depends on exactly the same causes as 

 ontogeny, it is to be regarded as a continuation of the latter. 

 By the ever- repeated inheritance of the characters of an 

 organism, and therewith of its organic unity, it has come 

 about that heredity not only reconstitutes this unity by 

 development, but also endeavours to reconstitute it after 

 injury. 



In order to understand this we must previously grasp 

 the fact that all the several particles of which the 

 organism is composed, that all the cells, all their molecules, 

 stand to one another in perfect correlation, so that each is 

 influenced bv the fate of the others, and that also in each 

 such particle there is something of the tendency to form a 

 wdiole — to unite together with the other particles to form a 

 whole, just as inorganic particles crystallise into a whole from 

 the mother liquid. The formation of crystals is in fact 

 scarcely less mysterious than the development of organic 

 forms — the latter also, to return to a previous comparison, is 

 a kind of crystallisation. Thus I also come back to the con- 

 ception of correlation, which is nothing else than the 

 expression, the consequence of the relations of all particles of 

 the organism with one another. 



I liave explained correlation also as organic crystallisation, 

 and recrescence is in fact an instance of correlation. 



My conception of the nature of the process of recrescence 

 becomes more intelligible when the attention is fixed, not on 

 the morphological parts of the body, but on the forces which 



