10 HERBERT SPENCER AND 



plasm, once it came into being, contained in itself all 

 the properties necessary for the development of all the 

 specific forms of life that now exist or have existed in 

 the intervening ages. A statue is not contained potentially 

 in a block of marble. It requires much play of incident 

 forces before the statue is produced out of the block, 

 and the most we can say is that the marble is, no doubt, 

 a necessary condition of the statue. So primordial proto- 

 plasm was a necessary antecedent condition of the exist- 

 ing world of organization, but a vast play of incident 

 forces has been required to develop that organization. 



Phyletically, therefore, the heterogeneity that we see 

 and recognize in animals in general has been acquired. 

 There has been always, on the whole, an addition of 

 something that was not there before. Sometimes, no 

 doubt, a subtraction, sometimes neither addition nor 

 subtraction, but a pause, for evolution has proceeded 

 in many directions, and in some cases has stood still, but 

 on the whole, a very great addition. 



But in ontogeny — the evolution of the individual — 

 the case is very different. Though the germ-cells of 

 different animals appear to us very nearly or exactly 

 alike, their behaviour shows us that they are not in the 

 least degree alike. Their qualities are specific and tend 

 to a specific result. That the hen's egg invariably gives 

 rise to a fowl and a duck's egg to a duck, was a matter 

 of wonder to the early philosophers, and it is a matter 

 for wonder still, though the phenomenon is so familiar, 

 that those who do not think about these things are apt 

 to deride us for aU the trouble we give ourselves about 

 them. But it is the hall-mark of stupidity to take 

 things for granted because they are familiar, and to fail 

 to find matter for wonder and reflection in the common 

 objects of life. 



To Herbert Spencer the development of the hetero- 

 geneous adult out of the homogeneous germ-cell presented 

 no great difficulty. 



