1885.] The Relations of Mind and Matter. 535 
integration was reached, and functional activity took its place, as 
the second great agent in evolution. Yet this check to chemism 
could have been by no means completed with the first appear- 
ance of active living forms. Superior and more susceptible pro- 
teids may have continued to appear, perhaps to the very borders ` 
of the present time, rendering the operation of functional change 
more and more active and capable. There is certainly good rea- 
son to believe that the protoplasmic basis of all beings is not 
identical, and if so, that chemical evolution may have continued, 
with ever-decreasing efficiency, throughout the whole long period 
of organic existence. As for the utter disappearance of the link 
forms between protoplasm and the highest existing inorganic 
compounds, it is no more surprising than the similar disappear- 
ance of so many of the link forms of life. They have been 
crowded out of existence by natural selection. Protoplasm 
doubtless has its embryology, whose steps, if we could trace 
them all, would lead us to a knowledge of its phylogeny. Many 
of the high-atomed products which successively appear in the 
development or during the disintegration and decay of organisms 
may be identical with primeval compounds which preceded proto- 
plasm. Yet all of these have their enemies in the vast and varied 
hosts of fungi which depend upon them for nutriment. They no 
sooner cease to be protected by the energies of active life, than 
they are assailed and partly reduced to simple inorganic condi- 
tions, partly become food for fungi. 
We can readily conceive, then, that were high-atomed chemical 
compounds now formed from the elements, by inorganic agency, 
they would in all probability be at once attacked by fungi, and © 
consumed as nutriment or disintegrated. The incessant activity 
of the fungoid organisms places a definite check on any high in- 
organic evolution under present conditions. Yet, as above said, 
in the existing. formation of protoplasm, its phylogeny is indi- 
cated precisely as the ancestral forms of the higher animals are 
indicated in their embryological development. Many of the 
steps may be slurred over in the one case as in the other, and in 
the formation of protoplasm by the plant, through successive inte- 
grations, from carbonic acid, water and ammonia, we may have a 
greatly shortened and masked preservation of the original steps 
of the development of protoplasm from the inorganic elements. 
The time may come when the human form can be phylogeneti- 
