192 Life and Love. 



The digestive apparatus courses alike through 

 the worm, the serpent, the frog, the hzard, the bird, 

 the four-footed mammal, the man. Nature, having 

 cunningly made a digestive tube to fit her worm, 

 and having made it a cosmic thing capable of 

 infinite expansion as life grew more complex, met 

 the greater needs by simply lengthening and coil- 

 ing the primitive tube, indenting it with glands that 

 also increased in size and complexity as necessity 

 demanded. Thus was the simple straight tube of 

 the lower animal type developed and elaborated to 

 do duty for even man himself. 



And what happened with the digestive apparatus 

 was repeated in all the other structures. Cleverly 

 there was evolved a universal plan of blood circu- 

 lation, so that modifications of the original type 

 sufficed for all succeeding forms. The nervous 

 system, too, grew in the same way, one starting- 

 point being common to all animals, simple and 

 complex, the higher animals but showing a greater 

 complexity of the original form. 



Organs came into being magnificently plastic. 

 Upon this power of mobility in growing things 

 depended all progress, plasticity being the most 

 essential endowment of life, giving that inestima- 

 ble power to change, to rise, to depart from the 

 original form, which has resulted in the present 

 condition of life on the earth. 



Plastic, full of possibilities of form and function, 

 the various organs arose, and, modified in innu 



