REPRODUCTION 103 



the formation of the body of an animal. For 

 here the origjnal_cell or machine as some 

 would have it does far more than reproduce 

 itself, it makes scores and hundreds of new 

 and quite different machines. We might per- 

 haps7 though with difficulty, imagine a lathe 

 which could beget other lathes, but here is 

 a lathe which produces sewing-machines, 

 organs, quick-firing guns, dredges, railway- 

 engines and a whole host of other complicated 

 assemblies of machinery. It is difficult if it is 

 not impossible to believe anything of the kind. 

 Some one has aptly remarked that if we were 

 to fill the hull of a huge steamship with 

 machinery as fine as that which is met with 

 in an ordinary watch it would in some measure 

 represent the complicated arrangements and 

 activities of the single cell, but what must be 

 its powers if it is capable of developing in the 

 manner and in the directions in which we know 

 that it can and does develop. In order to paral- 

 lel what it does by chemical processes one would 

 have to imagine a crystal, say, of the so-called 

 niicrocosmic salt, since that has a tolerably 

 complicated formula for an inorganic substance, 

 placed in some sea water. We have then to 

 suppose that this crystal collects to itself the 

 necessary materials and surrounds itself with 

 a number of crystals of other salts; collects 



