In the Commonplace are Greatest Wonders. 363

cleansed paddy, but is liker to wheat; sweet and palatable as food, more satisfying than rice. The periodic falls of this great spontaneous abundance attract to the region not only men, but rats, birds, deer, pigs, squirrels. Decay of the plants dates from their seeding, they fall about three years afterwards; by which period the young bamboos, that have struck root, attain a height of eight or ten feet. He is presumptuous and rash who, professing to know all about the varieties and sports of life having at one end something infinitely less than a tadpole and at the other a man, asserts "there never has been any insertion of Creative Power." God's ways are higher than our ways, His thoughts than our thoughts.

Vary and extend the inquiry.

Law, as applied to phenomena within range of human observation, stands on an equal footing with the axioms of geometry itself; but as phenomena are a continuity of the invisible into the visible, and of the visible into the invisible, whatever we know is bounded by the greater unknown. For example-the chemical composition and actual state of living matter is unknown. It changes and dies as we try to analyse it; and dead, not living substance, is in our hand. It is probable that during the living state the elements are not in any ordinary chemical combination, that the causes of transformation reside in the lowest germs, and operate in every interval of time. The initial point, the start, in all and everywhere, seems the same; nevertheless, the organic energy is essentially different. What surprises, variety of results, differences of structure and of functions, are contained in carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen-those four elements of the living creature! Where man finds neither distinction nor difference, a great gulf, which may not be passed, separates kind from kind. From the very centre of uniformity inscrutable energy works infinite variety. From the very same substance, emerge creatures which, as plants, are perfected in the tree; as animals, are glorified in man.

"The greatest wonder

Is, that to us the real true wonders can

Become so commonplace, and must become so."

Lessing.

Offspring resemble their parents, but the similarity never

amounts to absolute identity neither in body nor mind. The tendency to general likeness is constantly checked by an impulse leading to variety. Brothers and sisters, children of the same parents, are unequal from their birth. Many animals produce several young ones at a time; but all those young differ in size, colour, strength. In the wild state, differences are less marked. Some divergences of childorganism are so great as to be monstrous. There are no two individuals which can complete their life under quite the same external or internal conditions; and the difference first affects the functions, then the form of the organism. On the same field depasture the sheep, the horse, the bird; but one turns his nourishment into wool, another into hair, the third into feathers: who knows how or why? To Pericles were born Paralus and Xanthippus; just Aristides produced the infamous Lysimachus; Thucydides, the powerful-minded, was represented by the idiotic Milesias and the stupid Stephanos; the son of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus was Commodus. What a difference separated Oliver Cromwell from his son Richard! The only son of Addison was an idiot.

An unknown law, notwithstanding, establishes heredity. We talk of the wit of the Montemarts and of the Sheridans. Many celebrated fathers have sons of renown: the two Herschels, the two Colmans, the Kemble family, the Coleridges, the Darwins; Sebastian Bach's musical genius descended to three hundred of his race. These are cases of transmission. The power of an organised germ to unfold into a complex adult, and repeat ancestral details in the minutest traits, even when placed in conditions unlike those of its ancestors, is a capacity we cannot understand. A microscopic portion of seemingly structureless matter contains such an influence that the resulting man shall, fifty years after, become gouty or insane. Invisible atoms are piled on atoms and so a world is formed.

In the higher animals, every separate organ is a manifold structure, every organism a complication of related organs, the whole in many relations to the internal and external worlds. Were changes made by blind fortuity, the chances against the continuance of an organism, and against any permanent improvement, would be as those attending the production of Milton's poem, "Paradise Lost," from the

Progressive Amelioration.

365

fortuitous upsetting of a box of unassorted type. Were permanence ensured by rigid uniformity, progressive amelioration would be impossible. To regard creation aright, we must see it as a whole, working into orderly yet varying sequence. We may compare it to the mathematical artifice of expanding a function into a series; but the series adds nothing to the function-it is implicit in it. The comparison is not adequately complex, for the whole of Nature is, in many respects, analogous to the advance of life. Life, from appearance of the first speck of living matter in the world to the organisation of the most elaborate plants and animals, is strictly analogous, we may say, to the growth of every individual man in himself. Every one began as a speck of protoplasm, with scarcely any appreciable structure. Bit by bit, this became the adult complex organism. Our individual life is a recapitulation of cosmical life. The idea is scientific, and may be applied to the sphere of morals, as by an Apostle-"The wages of sin is death." The great work is self-culture: that we may help and raise others from lower sense to higher thought.

Until the year 1824, it was thought that the blood of every animal took one definite and invariable direction. In that year, M. von Haselt, happening to examine a little animal, the Ascidian, found that the heart, after beating a certain number of times, stopped, and then began to beat the opposite way, reversing the course of the current. Professor Huxley says "I have myself timed the heart of these little animals. I found it as regular as possible in its periods of reversal, and I know no spectacle in the animal kingdom more wonderful than that which it represents-all the more wonderful that to this day it remains a unique fact, peculiar to this class among the whole animated world."

Uniformity is evidently the floor of Nature's workshop; but the tools and mechanisms prove that variety is aimed at as a beauty, not always for utility: some beauty not being of any use. Coral-formerly counted a seaweed, has the singular property of becoming hard when brought up from native depths into contact with the air-we know now to be an animal though with stems and branches, and fixed to the soil. "It is a sort of natural co-operative store," one that buds and divides, a living thing laying numerous eggs. The young, coming forth from the eggs, have no

resemblance to their parents; but swim about until, having lost their cilia or hair-like filaments, they settle down in the sea bottom, or become fixed to the rock, and grow up like their ancestors. Here is a plant-no—an animal; the young go forth unlike their sires, in infancy volatile; but, finding discretion betimes, build upon a rock. Other creatures have little or no infancy: "their young are in good liking, go forth and return not unto them."

Birds of passage, without chart or compass, find their path across the sea, even to a place six thousand miles away, for suitable food. True, as the needle to the pole, are these birds to their right place and at right time. Gallinaceous fowl are, even at the first, equipped with instinct; and their bodies are clothed with feathers, yet not like the adult.

The fishes, Helmichthyida, have such clear fleshy bodies that the words of a book may be read through them. Fishes have no voice, yet the Mambra utters a cry, and has breasts, with milk;1 and that fish, the Amia, grunts in disapproval of the doctrine, "Nature in all things is uniform." Sundry, for no very obvious reason, ramble about on land. The fish, Perca Scandens, is found scaling rocks, climbing bushes, ascending trees. The squirting fish shoots drops of water at its prey, and seldom misses making booty. Mud-fish bury themselves, and remain dormant till the rains of the wet season set them free. "The world is all a wonder."

Closer inquiry discovers more interesting varieties. Synthetic types comprehend in one the properties of several groups of life; and those embryonic changes by which the young both of plants and animals, pass through comprehensive stages of existence, belonging to other creatures, exhibit physical and organic changes strangely connected with some unknown vastness. Science, far from rendering the universe less, proves it a greater mystery; the genesis of an atom is not easier to conceive than the genesis of a planet. Wisdom would be superficial did we not add thought to things.

Some other Specialities of Life.

The embryos of animals, apparently not different, are different. If the mammal throws off embryo with heart in two-chambered or fish form, it does not live; or in the three-chambered reptile form, it does not live; nor though ' Livingstone's “ Africa,” vol. ii. p. 44.

Variety of Life's Rhythm.

367

the brain of a child passes through some lower forms, is it at any time other than the brain of a human being. Organic structure is not merely conditioned by circumstances for circumstances; but passes beyond and above general circumstances into the peculiarities of special conditions: at some point in development of the individual, the human embryo becomes a living soul on the way to that kingship which mind-culture and heart-culture, aim at as purest sovereignty.

This variety of life's rhythm may be illustrated by light and sound. They are undulations of an elastic medium, simply wave-movement. By differences, more minute than those which separate light from sound, some life is limited to a monad-compared with which a grain of sand is an earth; other life is complicated and perfected in those functions of man which explore the universe in comparison with which our earth is but an atom.

There are oddest eccentricities. Porcupine men of the Lambert family, covered with thorn-shaped horny substance projecting more than an inch. Six-fingered and six-toed people, as the famous Spanish family of no less than forty individuals. Descend to smaller creatures-The Hyrax (coney of Scripture) is like a rabbit, but with strange divided hoof, miniature of the Rhinoceros' hoof. The Rotifera, despite complex structure and aquatic habits, can be nearly dried; and again brought to life by a little water. This wetting and drying, dying without death, can be repeated many times without killing these mysterious folk.

A Frog is the only creature that has a calf like a man. Inquiry as to the nature and affinities of the Frog reveals the independent origin of remarkably similar structures— such as a shielded temporal fossa and elongated tarsuswhich, with structures like the tooth of the Labyrinthodon, neither minute oscillations of structure nor sexual phenomena will account for. This process, considered in connection with the curious transformation of the Axolotl into a creature of quite another genus-the genus Amblystoma-shows the powerful action of internal tendencies which may long be latent, and points to the probability that such forms arose through implanted powers, by specific genesis.

From ordinary Mammals the milk is obtained by voluntary suction on the part of the young, but in the