THE NATURAL 



climbing. This is the death of the- species, and Nature 

 contemptuously abandoning her work, begins to make 

 yet another mould of the initial ooze, to derive from it 

 a new form. The dream of an unlimited transformation 

 of actual species is pure chimaera; they will disappear 

 one by one, according to their order of primogeniture, 

 according to their faculty for adapting themselves to 

 the changing milieu, and one might foresee, if the earth 

 lasts, in a distant time an unimaginable fauna replacing 

 the present fauna, and even replacing man. 



Man is a metazoaire, that is to say an animal with dif- 

 ferentiated pluricellules, like the sponge, the wheel ani- 

 mals, and the annelids. He belongs to the artizoaire 

 series: a head, belly, back, bilateral symmetry; to the 

 vertebrate branch: internal skeleton, cartilaginous and 

 osseous; to the class of mammifers, to the sub-class of 

 placentaires; to the group of primates not far from the 

 chiroptera (bats) and the rodents. 



In regard to the life-transmitting mechanism the ani- 

 mals are divided somewhat differently. On one side bud- 

 ding and division, or scissiparity, is prolonged rather 

 far into the metazoaire series concurrent with sexual 

 reproduction; on the other hand there are, among pro- 

 tozoaires, phenomena of coupling, unions of cellules 

 which resemble veritable fecundation and perform its 

 role; without the nuclear regeneration which is the aim 

 and consequence, neither segmentation nor budding can 

 take place, at least not indefinitely. In sum, the repro- 

 duction of beings is always sexual; only in the one case, 

 the protozoaires, it is produced by non-differentiated 

 elements; and in the other, the metazoaires, by differen- 

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