126 JOURNAL OF THE PLYMOUTH INSTITUTION. 
take the time required by the evolution of the canine tooth as that 
required by " irrelative spontaneity" stereotyped by the survival of 
the fittest, we shall find that it would have taken an infinitely 
longer time to evolve one such tooth as a ruminant's ; and a 
fortiori we shall require some other factor to be recognized, after 
one has been so evolved, before all the rest in the same jaw can 
conform to the same pattern. In fact the whole set of phenomena 
puts us more in mind of the progress of an invention, where, after 
one improvement has been made, its adoption is rapidly spread. 
Growth is after all as much an action as any other. The lowest 
form of life, such as an amoeba, performs voluntary or spontaneous 
action in taking food into itself, adding to its own body. Other low 
forms add a hard coat around themselves, and after performing this 
action a certain number of times it would become a habit, and if 
inherited an instinct. If a number of these low forms of life 
clustered together, and filled up the interspaces with the harder 
covering, or formed material, we should see a process very similar 
to that which histologists inform us we have in the cell formation 
of the tissues of the higher animals. Thus we see that the laws 
of growth may claim to come under recognition as showing volition, 
habit, instinct, intelligence. And we may note that common lan- 
guage gives to the word habit the double meaning of "familiar 
action " and garment, giving us some insight into the meaning of 
those beautiful lines of the poet Goethe, who was also a scientific 
man — 
" Here in the roaring loom of time I ply 
To weave the garment that thou seest me by." 
