FACTS 201 



within the chicken. But, the moment the chicken continued 

 to live, such functioning must have comprised, along with 

 variable and fantastic parts the renewal of the interior 

 medium fatally developing by functional assimilation 

 certain parts of a chicken ; and these, precisely, are the 

 essential parts of its organism. Thus, through all the func- 

 tionings that support life, the chicken-character is pre- 

 served. 



This chicken-character already existed in the egg, without 

 our being able to define it otherwise. This gallinity ("gal- 

 lina," Latin for chicken) in the egg's heredity determines 

 under pain of death development in the direction chicken. 

 When we study under the microscope the structure of a 

 hen's egg, we cannot distinguish gallinity in it. We define 

 the gallinity either by the origin of the egg, or by the result 

 of its development, when it exists in the conditions required 

 for not dying. 



This is exactly -the same case as what we related of dias- 

 tases. We can define them only by their origin, or their 

 results ; and for the most part a complete definition would 

 oblige us to know at once the origin and result. Now an 

 egg is much more complicated than a diastase ; in par- 

 ticular, it is constituted by a great number of superposed 

 diastases which can sometimes be experimentally separated 

 from each other. For the present, therefore, we do not 

 pretend to be able to recognize the species of an egg other- 

 wise than by its mother or its product. 



Nevertheless, many naturalists long since proposed to 

 explain by some hypothetic structure of the egg, the mar- 

 vellous fact that the egg almost completely determines the 

 evolution of the living animal that comes from it. They 

 had not made the reasonings which we have made ; they 

 had not decomposed individual evolution into a series of 



