364: THE INDUCTIONS OF BIOLOGY. 



been instanced the above-named formation of a false joint 

 with its appurtenances. For the implication in both cases is 

 that a local group of units, determined by circumstances 

 towards a certain structure, coerces its individual units into 

 that structure. 



Now let us contemplate the essential fact in the analogy. 

 The men in an Australian mining-camp, as M. Pierre 

 Leroy Beaulieu points out, fall, into Anglo-Saxon usages 

 diiferent from those which would characterize a French 

 mining-camp. Emigrants to a far West settlement in America 

 quickly establish post-office, bank, hotel, newspaper, and 

 other urban institutions. We are thus shown that along 

 with certain traits leading to a general type of social organ- 

 ization, there go traits which independently produce fit local 

 organizations. Individuals are led into occupations and 

 official posts, often quite new to them, by the wants of those 

 around — are now influenced and now coerced into social 

 arrangements which, as shown perhaps by gambling saloons, 

 by shootings at sight, and by lynchings, are scarcely at all 

 affected by the central government. Now the physiological 

 units in each species appear to have a similar combination of 

 capacities. Besides their general proclivity towards the 

 specific organization, they show us abilities to organize 

 themselves locally; and these abilities are in some cases dis- 

 played in defiance of the general control, as in the super- 

 numerary finger or the false joint. Apparently each physio- 

 logical unit, while having in a manner the whole organism 

 as the structure which, along with the rest, it tends to form, 

 has also an aptitude to take part in forming any local struc- 

 ture, and to assume its place in that structure under the 

 influence of adjacent physiological units. 



A familiar fact supports this conclusion. Everyone has 

 at hand, not figuratively but literally, an illustration. Let 

 him compare the veins on the backs of his two hands, either 

 with one another or with the veins on another person^s hands, 

 and he will see that the branchings and inosculations do not 



