AS REGARDS PROTOPLASM, ETC. ' 57 



wattles, spurs, and all a modified yolk, as to call the church, 

 but modified stones ? If, in the latter case, an element of 

 difference, altogether undeniable, seems to have intervened, is 

 not such intervention at least quite as well marked in the 

 former ? It requires but a slight analysis to detect that all the 

 stones in question are marked and numbered ; but will any 

 analysis point out within the shell the various parts that only 

 need arrangement to become the fowl *? Are the men that may 

 take the stones, and, in a re-erected Trinity College Church, 

 realise anew the idea of its architect, in any respect more 

 wonderful than the unknown disposers of the materials of the 

 fowl ? That what realises the idea should, in the one case, be 

 from without, and, in the other, from within, is no reason for 

 seeing more modification and less wonder in the latter than the 

 former. There is certainly no more reason for seeing the foAvl 

 in the egg, and as identical with the egg, than for seeing a 

 re-built Trinity College Church as identical with its unarranged 

 materials. A part cannot be taken for the whole, whether in 

 space or in time. Mr Huxley misses this. He is so absorbed in 

 the identity out of which, that he will not see the difference 

 into which, progress is made. As the idea of the church has 

 the stones, so the idea of the fowl has the egg, for its com- 

 mencement. But to this idea, and in both cases, the terminal 

 additions belong, quite as much as the initial materials. If the 

 idea, then, add sulphur, phosphorus, iron, and what not, it must 

 be credited with these not less than with the carbon, hydrogen, 

 etc., with which it began. It is not fair to mutter modification, 

 as if it were a charm to destroy all the industry of time. The 

 protoplasm of the egg of the fowl is no more the fowl than the 

 stones the church ; and to identify, by juggle of a mere word, 

 parts in time and wholes in time so different, is but self-decep- 

 tion. Nay, in protoplasm, as we have so often seen, difference 

 is as much present at first as at last. Even in its germ, even 

 in its initial identity, to call it so. protoplasm is already different, 

 for it issues in differences infinite. 



Omission of the consideration of difference, it is to be acknow- 

 ledged, is not nowadays restricted to Mr Huxley. In the 

 wonder that is usually expressed, for example, at Oken's 

 identification of the skull with so many vertebrae, it is forgot 

 that there- is still implicated the wonder which we ought to feel 

 at the unknown power that could, in the end, so differentiate 

 them. If the cornea of the eye and the enamel of the teeth are 

 alike but modified protoplasm, we must be pardoned for thinking 

 more of the adjective than of the substantive. Our wonder is 

 how, for one idea, protoplasm could become one thing here, and, 

 for another idea, another so different thing there. We are more 

 curious about the modification than the protoplasm. In the 



