J. Bret land Farmer . 
196 
crystals) to the fact that their constituent particles—molecules or 
other aggregates,—are held together in systems hy the operation 
of certain forces. That these take up more or less easily analysahle 
geometrical forms probably depends on the homogenety and relative 
simplicity of the particles, hut some fluid bodies are known in which 
nevertheless certain optical characters usually associated with 
crystalline structure are also met with. 
But the form of a living organism, hy the very fact of its 
constancy, can hardly he of a very different order, though the 
relationship of matter and force must be enormously more com¬ 
plex than they are in a crystal. And this materialistic conclusion, 
first I think seriously put forward hy Herbert Spencer, is in 
harmony with the differences, as well as the similarities that mark 
diverse organisms. “ All flesh is not the same flesh, but there 
is one kind of flesh of men, another flesh of beasts, another of fishes 
and another of birds,” and it is just because they are not the same 
that the relationships that subsist between their constituent matter 
and the forces acting on it, find their expression in differences of 
form and of other properties. 
I will not attempt to force an analogy between the similar 
crystalline forms often characteristic of salts of widely different 
composition and that mimicry of form so frequently to be observed 
in animals and plants. But I should like to say that the acceptance 
of the view that the form-character of an organism is an inherited 
property, the outcome of evolutionary changes, is no more an 
explanation of the phenomenon itself than it would be to assert that 
the crystals of salt deposited from a solution owe their form to the 
hereditary transmission of the form of the parent crystals employed 
to make the solution. 
The form is transmitted in neither case, all that is handed on is 
the material; and when placed under suitable conditions, out of the 
material arises—the necessary crystalline form in the one case, the 
necessary living form in the other, when the relations of force and 
matter are appropriately adjusted. 
That the living form is immeasurably more complex is partly, 
perhaps largely, due to the continuously disturbing influence of 
those chemical changes that accompany the process of ontogeny, 
for in this way also the physical relationships of the parts concerned 
are as constantly being affected. But experience is against any 
assumption that this chemical march of events may he capricious in 
its course. On the contrary, in healthy life it pursues a fairly even, 
