50 PHILOSOPHICAL NOTES ON 



the internal growing energy leaves it no alternative but to 

 go on. 



Organs are elastic. They can either expand and develop in 

 the direction in which conditions are favourable, and act as 

 feelers for further progress, or they are withdrawn, like tentacles, 

 where conditions are unfavourable, and kept in abeyance and 

 reserve, that is, in a rudimentary and dormant potential state. 

 Among the factors of restriction of growth we must place also the 

 inadequacy of the sucking apparatus to nourish all the existing 

 parts, so that some, from want of sustenance, will abort. There 

 may be organs, which once developed, although they may have 

 oeased to be useful, either encumber or hamper the individual as 

 useless limbs, or are turned to some other account^ in an infinity 

 of ways, as helpers in the struggle for life. 



Like the mobility of water, this plasticity of living matter, with 

 sensitiveness, enables it to occupy every nook and corner and 

 crevice, so to speak, of its surroundings wherever these allow it 

 to flow. Unlike water, living matter may have a concreteness 

 which interferes with parts being always retraced into a homo- 

 geneous body, and therefore as I said, organs, once developed and 

 become useless, may remain to hamper the indvidual, or they may 

 be retracted into abortions, or possibly they may be turned to 

 some other useful account, than the one they were originally 

 grown to suit. 



All growth is like a river, which has continued to flow without 

 interruption from the same source or sources. But as little bits 

 of it have been perpetually detached, to lead an independent life, 

 as we see them around us, whether in the animal or vegetable 

 world — we seem to forget that they are, and have always been, 

 like a river, leaving little independent pools to Jill the crevices 

 and suit themselves to the undulatio^is of the surface, each 

 portion may happen to occupy. 



So much unprofitable thought appears to have been expended 

 on the question of whether a man's intellect is, or is not, subject 

 to the same laws of natural selection, as other parts of the 

 vegetable and animal creations — that it may not perhaps be out 

 of place to end this note with my own thoughts upon this 

 interesting subject. 



