336 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



the simple sentence, "Our great kingdom appears; we love it," 

 must be expressed as, " The kingdom our dom, which dom is the 

 great dom, the dom appears, we love the dom" (U-bu-kosi b-etu 

 o-bu-kulu bu-ya-bonakala si-bu-tanda). So the saving attained in 

 such a language as English may be easily inferred from the wild 

 luxuriance in analytic distinctions of all tongues in an early stage 

 of development. 



It should be added that the gain which comes of the gradual 

 rejection of inflection is a gain not merely in the domain of lan- 

 guage alone, it is throughout made possible by mental ascent, 

 and the whole of the progress which it implies is a progress not 

 only in the saving of labor in the intercourse between men, but 

 also in the enlargement and perfection of the ends of that inter- 

 course. 



We now return from this brief and highly incomplete account 

 of the various forms of acting to consider the application of our 

 principle to the case of the organic system. That principle ad- 

 mitted, it will be at once obvious that the law of least resistance 

 must be true of all those rearrangements and activities which are 

 imposed upon a living protoplasmic system in the interest of 

 maintenance. If, in other words, such aggregate be impelled by 

 the forces inherent in organic molecules to maintain itself, the 

 various means by which it will maintain itself will be means such 

 as, from the minutest detail of structural rearrangement to the 

 highest organ and process, are best adapted under the whole of 

 the circumstances to accomplish the end of maintenance with the 

 minimum expenditure of energy, and this for the reason that only 

 such means can arise by movement in the direction of the least 

 resistance. It also follows, from the inevitableness of the law 

 and from the character of the organic aggregate as a system of 

 parts, that the means by which maintenance is carried on by such 

 aggregate will undergo progressive improvement, and will there- 

 fore illustrate the same gradual advance in the economizing of 

 energy and the perfecting of end as those which are exemplified 

 in the ascent of the human community. 



The obvious analogy between the parts of an organic system 

 and the individuals constituting a human society is completely 

 borne out on examination. Whether, in fact, the primitive or- 

 ganic aggregate be viewed as a union of previously separated 

 units, or as an organic mass divided into unit parts that are first 

 likes to each other and only finally differentiated, or as an aggre- 

 gate that undergoes differentiation of its parts the moment it is 

 sufficiently advanced in complexity to possess organic character, 

 the fact remains that the parts can not constitute an organic sys- 

 tem without aiding each other in the work of maintenance. Even 

 if we could regard them as independent of each other, though 



