6o6 THE WONDER OF LIFE 



this idea to the non-rational animals, and we think of 

 them, probably aright, as trjdng this and trying that, and 

 finally doing something. We carry this idea down and 

 down, and probably it is much truer than many naturalists 

 think, but we doubt whether it is by thinking of adult 

 organisms that we shall understand what trading with 

 time really means. 



The suggestion we wish to make is this. No one will 

 dispute the statement that an Amoeba may profit by its 

 experiences and may make experiments ' in the Ught of ' 

 these experiences. Now it must be remembered that the 

 germ-cells or gametes are not ordinary cells ; they are indi- 

 vidualities, organisms, creatures, who Uve and multiply, 

 who struggle and combiae, who are repositories of multi- 

 plicate inheritances adjusting themselves inter se in the 

 most momentous of organic compromises. Now it may be 

 that these gametes — ^neither simple cells nor portmanteaus 

 of hereditary items, but unified ' creatures ', experiment 

 not fortuitously, but artistically, not at random, but with 

 a purpose. 



The Living Past. — In any case, one of the strongest 

 impressions that we get from the study of organic evolution 

 is that of the persistence of the past in the present. In a 

 manner inconceivable to us, save through the analogy of 

 memory, the germ-cell garners the long results of time. 

 To some extent in the development of organs in the indivi- 

 dual there is a recapitulation of stages which correspond 

 to long chapters in the evolution of the race. And just 

 as we recognize traits of their wild hneage in our domesti- 

 cated animals, so in a wider field we see the individual's 

 organic reminiscence of primeval days and a recrudescence 

 of ancestral wounds. In ourselves we are only too well 



