216 
Vast, certainly, for who can calculate the extent of that 
which must pervade everything, and reach to the remotest 
star. Unknown also, for we do not know what intimate 
relationship this may have with those essences of soul and 
spirit of which we ourselves consist; of which relations we are 
sometimes unpleasantly reminded in the changes of electric 
states. 
It is life, and organization, and what we call “ mind ” that is 
the real mystery, rather than the continuation of these things 
in succeeding generations. 
To illustrate what I mean from the vegetable^creation, let us 
take a sprig from a sensitive plant, another from an herb 
exhibiting automatic movements, another from a tree having 
powerful effects on the animal economy. Allow these to grow, 
and we shall see them each develop the qualities of the original 
plant. Why? because of some difference in the oxygen, 
hydrogen, carbon, or nitrogen, of which they are shown by 
analysis alike to consist? Certainly not, for the most search- 
ing analysis can find no difference; but something has escaped 
us, and this the most important of all. 
Of this “ something” we know that it is essential to the organ- 
ization, and yet that it does not reside in the chemical atoms of 
the organized body itself. It is not a cell nor a nucleus, nor 
anything else which we can define ; neither is it dependent on 
circumstances. 
“ Atquo liac re ncqueunt ex omnibus omnia gigni 
Quod certis in rebus inest secreta faeultas.” * 
The “ sccreta facultas” on which all this depends remains as 
unexplained as it was in the days of Lucretius. 
These essentise may be so far combined as to follow the same 
lines of growth, and yet so far separate as to come out indivi- 
dually in their full and manifest distinctness. 
Thus, in the Cytisus Adami, which was formed by a 
gardener who gave his name to the compound plant, different 
varieties of Cytisus are fused together. I have seen an old 
tree in a garden at Highgate which grew alternately or in- 
differently branches of three kinds of Cytisus — the kinds 
retaining all their peculiarity, both in the branching and 
inflorescence. 
The reversion of one single branch in a tree, such as the 
fern-leaved beech, to the primitive and widely-differing normal 
* Lucretius clc Rerum Naturfi, lib. i. 173 — 175, 
