306 CHAPTERS ON EVOLUTION. 



them by real as well as by transcendental bonds to lower and ante- 

 cedent phases of existence. 



The topic of the personality of living beings, like most other bio- 

 logical subjects, relates itself more or less indirectly with matters 

 personal and ethical which are far beyond the scope of the present 

 study. But it is permissible, in a closing sentence, to remark that 

 many of the characteristic traits of the life of the higher animals, in- 

 cluding man himself, may perchance be traceable to an unconscious 

 perpetuation of habits and customs which find their beginnings and 

 germs in the lower colonial organisms whose history has just been 

 discussed. The nervous acts of man and the higher animals generally, 

 for instance, convince us that many of the functions of the brain, 

 and the automatic actions of the body depending on the independent 

 constitution of our nerve-centres, may be legitimately explained by 

 referring them, as regards their origin, to an originally colonial con- 

 stitution, and to a primitively colonial ancestry. Even a glance at 

 the serial repetition of the bones (or vertebrae) in the spine of man 

 or other backboned animal, eloquently enough testifies to the appa- 

 rent colonial constitution of these forms. There is a striking analogy, 

 which has not escaped biological notice, between the arrangement 

 of these segments in the Vertebrata and the similar disposition of 

 parts in the Articulata or worm and centipede-type. However the 

 Vertebrate's serial arrangement has originated, it may perhaps ,be 

 held as legitimate evidence of compound nature ; just, indeed, as the 

 colonial nature of Vertebrate tissues demonstrates that nature in 

 another fashion. And so, also, with other phases of human relation- 

 ship and functions. As the various detached buds of a hydra, or 

 the free-swimming buds of a zoophyte, are still part and parcel of 

 the individual constitution, or as the plant-lice and bees, apparently of 

 distinct personality, are in reality only parts of the connected colony, 

 so, m the sphere of human relationships, the origin of the tribal 

 connection or of the family constitution itself the most expressive 

 of all human institutions may perchance be found to exist in germ- 

 form in the hidden transcendental bond which the philosophy of the 

 lower animal individuality discloses. The deep-seated affections and 

 relationships which, collectively, we term the "family" and "society" 

 respectively, may have had their first beginnings in the connected series 

 of interests which even the zoophyte-series discloses to view. In 

 other words, we are constituted as we are, gregarious, social, and 

 ethical, because we are physically " colonial " by constitution, and 

 because in our origin we are essentially of colonial and compound 

 nature. And if such a thought be regarded as too improbable for 

 realisation, it should be borne in mind that our structural beginnings 

 themselves are of the lowliest and simplest description. If the 

 structural germs of the highest life begin, as they certainly do, under 



