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Of the chief characteristics of all living beings none is so significant as their periodicity. Plants as well as animals exhibit this periodic character. Thus plants have their annual as well as daily periods of activity and inactivity. Hibernating animals pass the winter in a condition of unconsciousness only to have their functions of activity restored in early spring.
But the "reasons annexed" are calmly ignored. The consequence is that the reader is confirmed in his exaggerated idea of the nervous irritability of the American people. There seems to be a periodicity in their seizures. At intervals of four years they indulge in an orgy of mutual recrimination, and then suddenly return to their normal state of money-getting. It is all very unaccountable.
The frequency of the Aurora Borealis was found by Wolf to follow the same period. In fact, it is closely allied in its cause to terrestrial magnetism. Wolf also collected old observations tracing the periodicity of sun-spots back to about 1700 A.D. Spoerer deduced a law of dependence of the average latitude of sun-spots on the phase of the sun-spot period.
The phenomenon is so common that its importance is usually overlooked. It should be considered as only one instance of a rule, which holds good for all stems and all branches, and which is everywhere dependent on the relation of growth to nutrition. The rule of periodicity not only affects the size of the organs, but also their number, whenever these are largely variable.
There is a different action day and night, but this in itself is a form of periodicity. In the same way we have summer and winter. The tree feeds itself in summer and during the winter the life remains hidden at the root while the process of making the texture firm proceeds with rhythmic alternation. All phases of life and growth are periodic.
Towards the autumn many of them produce fewer and fewer converted heads and often only these are fertile and yield seeds. Ascidia afford another instance of this periodicity, though ordinarily they are by far too rare to show any regularity in their distribution.
Even puberty is less disturbing in its effect upon a boy than upon a girl; and often by eighteen we can anticipate the life of a young man with great accuracy. The one element in his life hardest to forecast is the effect of his love-affairs. See chapter on Periodicity in G. STANLEY HALL'S Adolescence, Vol. I, p. 472. With a woman, it is quite different.
Moreover it may easily be effected by any one who cares for experimental studies, but has not the means required for cultures on a larger scale. And lastly, there are a number of questions about heredity, periodicity, dependency on nourishment and other life conditions, and even about hybridizing, which may be answered by this new method.
The click! clank! clank! of their peavies sounded like the valves of some great engine, so regular was the periodicity of their metallic recurrence. They made quite a hole in the breast; and several times the jam shrugged, creaked and settled, but always to a more solid look. Billy, the teamster, brought down his horses.
They have heads that seem too large for their bodies, the general hair distribution on the trunk and extremities is poor, although that of the scalp and face is plentiful, and they acquire an abdominal paunch early. They exhibit the feminine tendency to periodicity of function, their moods, activities, efficiency are cyclic, reminding one of the menstrual variations of the female.
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