UNLIKEXESS IN ORGANISMS. 153 



in them. The old Lucretian hypothesis is so far an- 

 swered that it needs no longer to be considered in the 

 conflict with materialism. It is not only crass and 

 obsolescent, but among scholars it is obsolete. Let 

 Herbert Spencer, however, be the policeman to give it 

 a last arrest and imprisonment. In his " Biology," a 

 book now outgrown by the progress of knowledge, 

 Spencer wrote in 1866, " It cannot be in those proxi- 

 mate chemical compounds composing organic bodies, 

 that specific polarity dwells. It cannot be that the 

 atoms of albumen, or fibrine, or gelatine, or the hypo- 

 thetical protein-substance, possess this power of ag- 

 gregating into specific shapes," and he gives the 

 same reason upon which Agassiz insisted, " for in 

 such case there would be nothing to account for the 

 unlikeness of different organisms. Millions of species 

 of plants and animals, more or less contrasted in their 

 structures, are all mainly built up of these complex 

 atoms. But if the polarities of these atoms deter- 

 mined the forms of the organisms they composed, the 

 occurrence of such endlessly varied forms would be 

 inexplicable. Hence, what we may call the chemical 

 units are clearly not the possessors of this property." 

 (JBiology, American edition, vol. i. p. 181.) 



Many a man who calls himself a Spencerian, but is 

 only a random student of his writings, or who has 

 read him with his fingers more than with his eyes, 

 and heard him with his elbows rather than with his 

 ears, will defend on the street, and sometimes in the 

 newspapers, that obsolescent form of materialism 

 which even Spencer discards. I shall, from this 



