EVOLUTION AND DISSOLUTION 



to become self-defeating, the antagonist process 

 gains the mastery for which it has all along 

 been striving, and the constituents of the body 

 are separated and scattered. 



But the coexistence and alternate mastery of 

 these two opposing processes, though most 

 strikingly exemplified in the case of organisms, 

 is by no means confined to organic phenomena. 

 Neither in the cloud, nor in the rock, which we 

 have chosen as examples, does concentration or 

 diffusion ever go on alone. The one is always 

 antagonized by the other. Even while the cloud 

 is most rapidly losing motion and integrating 

 matter, it is receiving some solar radiance, either 

 direct or reflected from the earth or moon, and 

 the absorption of this radiance causes some dis- 

 integration of its matter. Even while it is most 

 quickly vanishing under the burning solar ravs, 

 this cloud is still simultaneously losing heat by 

 radiation, and the loss tends to reintegrate it. 

 And likewise our sedimentary rocky deposit, 

 while aggregating, is nevertheless daily abraded 

 by passing currents, and at longer intervals is 

 perhaps cracked by those telluric vibrations 

 known as earthquakes. 



As finally amended then, our formula asserts 

 that the career of any composite body is a se- 

 ries of more or less complicated rhythms, of 

 which the differential result is, at first, the in- 

 tegration of its constituent matter and the dis- 

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