74 HEREDITY. 



called life, they are as independent of the habits 

 or experience of the co-ordinated organism as the 

 loom is independent of the water and of the steam 

 which throws it into action, or of the plan of the 

 web. 



21. As provided for in the original peculiarities of 

 the transmitted co-ordinating power in man, and as in- 

 dependent of their own effects, the necessary beliefs can- 

 not be invalidated by the pretence that they depend on 

 our environment, and ivould have been different had our 

 experience been different. 



Consider the marvel of a tropical forest. Charles 

 Kingsley, with powers of description rarely matched, 

 pictures for us the High Woods he entered on a day 

 of which you will read the record in his fascinating 

 book, " At Last," a prose poem from its opening to 

 its close. Palms of twenty species towered above his 

 head there under the torrid noon ; and around them 

 ran vines of hundreds of kinds, fattening in the tropi- 

 cal sunlight. Minor shrubs sprang up, filling all the 

 interstices of the woods. Ripened fruits, which we 

 gather and prize as rarities, were dropping through 

 the scented silence. On the ground he looked for 

 refuse, but found none. He searched for the debris 

 of fallen trunks, but that was no longer visible ; for 

 such is the vigor of tropical growths, that this refuse 

 of the woods is sucked up at once into the enlarging 

 tissues of the vegetation standing in the soil. There 

 are no rotting leaves and trunks in a great tropical 

 forest. The matter contained in such sheddings is 

 absorbed swiftly into the fatness of the vegetation, 



