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Three factors enter into the mechanism. One is the amount of the circulating internal secretions. Another is the organic and functional integrity of the nerve filaments comprising the check and drive systems.
In these creatures this part is so contrived that it shall pulsate, as there is here a necessity for some impulse to distribute the nutritive fluid, by reason of the variety of organic parts, or of the density of the substance; but the pulsations occur unfrequently, and sometimes in consequence of the cold not at all, an arrangement the best adapted to them as being of a doubtful nature, so that sometimes they appear to live, sometimes to die; sometimes they show the vitality of an animal, sometimes of a vegetable.
Thus ever in gloom, yet in a state of constant safety from storms and the agitations of the upper air, the thousand forms of low organic life and cryptogamic vegetation live and thrive in peace and quietness. Upon the bottom, at various depths, lies that brilliant Radiate type of his class the Star-fish.
He existed on earth before colour came in; and colour is old, although not so old as Nature's unconscious aestheticism which, in the organic world, is first expressed in beauty of form.
"Probably the increase was all produced by the green manure," suggested the Chief. "Organic matter has a great influence on the control of the moisture supply." "That was tested," said Percy.
Again, the author says, "The mere superiority of man over lower forms of organic and inorganic matter does not lift him above physical laws." Yes, it does, partially at least, for it enables him, in his sphere, to control the very forces whose action is limited by laws. The superiority of man is shown in his control of the powers of nature, and making them obey his will.
Still, in a rain-drop just formed we have very nearly pure water; but even this contains dissolved air to the extent of about one-fiftieth of its volume, and as the drop falls downward it takes up such impurities as may be floating in the atmosphere; so that if our rain-drop is falling immediately after a long drought, it becomes charged with nitrate or nitrite of ammonia and various organic matters perhaps also the spores or germs of disease.
Owing to this struggle for life, any variation, however slight, and from whatever cause proceeding, if it be in any degree profitable to an individual of any species, in its infinitely complex relations to other organic beings and to external nature, will tend to the preservation of that individual, and will generally be inherited by its offspring.
This is the title of an address delivered by Du Bois-Reymond on 25th January 1883, in the Berlin Academy of Sciences, and afterwards published in his Collected Addresses (vol. ii. 1887). As the author himself mentions in a note (p. 500) that this gave rise, "most unmeritedly," to great excitement, and called down upon him the violent attacks of the clerical press, I may be allowed to point out here that it contained nothing new, I myself, fifteen years previously, in my lectures on "The Origin and Genealogy of the Human Race," having carried out in detail the comparison between Darwin and Copernicus, and the service rendered by these two heroes in putting an end to the anthropocentric and geocentric views of the world. (See the Third Series in Virchow and Holtzendorff's Collection of Popular Scientific Lectures, Nos. 53 and 54, 1868, 4th ed., 1881.) When Du Bois-Reymond says, "For me, Darwin is the Copernicus of the organic world," I am the more pleased to find that he agrees (partly in identical words) with my way of thinking, as he himself, quite unnecessarily, takes up an attitude of opposition towards me. The same is the case with regard to the explanation of innate ideas by Darwinism, which he has attempted in his address on "Leibnitzian Ideas in Modern Science" (vol. i. of the Collected Addresses). Here also he is most agreeably at one with me in what, four years before, I had elaborated in my General Morphology (vol. ii. p. 446), and in my Natural History of Creation . "The laws of heredity and adaptation explain to us how it is that
The birth of Scientific Socialism came as the result of the discovery of a great new truth. This truth revolutionized all our ideas about society just as Darwin's discovery, eleven years later, revolutionized our notions of organic life. From 1848 forward there was no need for speculations and guesses as to how the world will be in the future or how it might be now if it were not as it is.
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