8 The First Lines of Morphology 
succession of forms (many Acalephee); but amid the over- 
action of the ambient medium, life is safe only by its having 
the power of reverting to the spherical form when things are 
at the worst. As a case of great difference between the 
orgasm and the ambient medium, we may instance that in 
which the latter is too cold. Life is compatible even with 
a bed of snow; but as to the form of the characteristic orgasm 
found in such a medium, its generic name Spherococcus 
sufficiently indicates what it is. And generally, given any 
orgasm or living being which in a genial medium possesses 
an expanded form, or form furnished with expanded parts, 
such as tentacula or limbs, and let it be exposed to cold, does 
it not immediately shrink up into as rounded a form as it can ? 
All the forms of hybernation, whether of the vegetable or 
animal kingdom, compared with their summer forms, are 
rounded. The same fact is also illustrated by such living 
beings as can adapt their forms from time to time to the 
ambient medium as it changes. Be it cold or hunger, or 
danger (provided they do not try to flee from it), or be it any 
other influence unfavourable to the deployment of life that 
assails them, they let fall, draw in, shrink up, coil round, and 
in a thousand ways attempt sphericity of form. And this form 
some of them, even quadrupeds—the hedgehog, for instance— 
successfully attain. Let only the conservation of life for 
future deployment, when the conditions of existence may be- 
come favourable, be the aim of Nature, then, even though that 
favourable change should never come, still Nature does her 
part in the meantime to secure under a spherical contour what 
of life exists. The back of the sick man falling into years may 
never be able again to support an erect figure, the bosom of 
the healthy virgin may never be called upon to give forth 
milk to an infant, still, in the meantime, as the form of con- 
servation, both are rounded; and both being in the harmony 
of things, both being a homage to the same principle, both an 
obedience to a “law which is ordained unto life,” both have 
a peculiar beauty, each its own; for beauty is universally 
the language of law triumphant.* Let it not be thought that 
* See “ The Philosophy of the Beautiful,’ by the author. Edmonston and 
Douglas, Edinburgh. 
