

THE BEGINNINGS OF LIFE. 



Ill 



■nts 



'•enti 



the 



conditio, 



are no 1 

 selves as y,^ 

 time that 

 ^ the actiojf 



natomical el(. 

 irly be saiii; 

 , each after it 



^ 



f the whole ii 





and^ in hea' 



er organisoii': 

 » Organisms 

 ts machine^'. 



Ltion 



of 



?( 



inHuence ^■ 



muscular and nervous elements may and do still live 

 for a time — the nerve will conduct a stimulus under 



'_• 



which the muscle will contract \ and so is it^ even 

 more markedly^ with the epithelial cells — those pos- 

 sessing cilia display their characteristic vital actions 

 long after the organism considered as a complex whole 

 has ceased to live. 



Now the lower we descend in the scale of living 

 things, the less marked does the life of the organism 

 as a whole become, in contradistinction to the life of 

 its several parts. The ^ tendency to individuation ^ be- 

 comes less and less manifest in proportion as the struc- 

 tural differentiation diminishes. The more the several 

 parts of an organism resemble one another, the less 

 diff^erence is there between the functions discharged 

 by these several parts, and therefore the importance 

 is proportionately less to the whole organism when 



B J 



one of these functions is interfered with. This is but 

 saying, in other words, that the machinery of Life grows 

 less and less complex^ and that we are gradually ap- 

 proximating more and more to a state of things in 

 which, to employ the same simile^ we have a mere 

 aggregate of wheels, a mere repetition of more or less 

 similar parts, with progressively less of mutual inter- 

 dependence between their several actions. Who has 

 not noticed the slowness with which a serpent dies, 

 how the toad clings to Life ? Look at the writhing 



body has been cut by 



segment of the worm whose 



the 



gardener's spade, or at the green 



Nereis of the 



