354 PHYSIOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT. 



This conception of the nature and mode of action of muscle, 

 while it is suggested by known properties of colloidal matter 

 and conforms to the recent conclusions of organic chemistry 

 and molecular physics, establishes a comprehensible relation 

 between the vital actions of the lower and the higher animals. 

 If we contemplate the movements of cilia, of a Rhizopod's 

 pseudo-podia, of a Polype's body, or of the long pendant ten- 

 tacles of a Medusa, we shall see great congruity between 

 them and this hypothesis. Bearing in mind that the con- 

 tractile substance of developed muscle is affected not by 

 nervous influence only, but, where nervous influence is 

 destroyed, is made to contract by mechanical disturbance and 

 chemical action, we may infer that it does not differ intrin- 

 sically from the primordial contractile substance, which, in 

 the lowest animals, changes its bulk under other stimuli than 

 the nervous. We shall see significance in the fact ascer- 

 tained by Dr. Hansom, that various agents which excite 

 and arrest nervo-muscular movements in developed animals, 

 excite and arrest the protoplasmic movements in ova. We 

 shall understand how tissues not yet differentiated into muscle 

 and nerve, have this joint irritability and contractility ; how 

 muscle and nerve may arise by the segregation of their 

 mingled colloids, the one of which, not appreciably altering 

 its bulk during isomeric change, readily propagates molecular 

 disturbance, while the other, contracting when isomerically 

 changed, less readily passes on the molecular disturbance ; 

 and how by this differentiation and integration of the con- 

 ducting and the contracting colloids, the one ramifying 

 through the other, it becomes possible for a whole mass to 

 contract suddenly, instead of contracting gradually, as it does 

 when undifferentiated. 



The question remaining to be asked is — What causes the 

 specialization of contractile substance ? — What causes the 

 growth of colloid masses which monopolize this contractility, 

 and leave kindred colloids to monopolize other properties ? 

 Has natural selection gradually localized and increased 



