Page:Life and death (1911).djvu/305

 specific type or a variety of it. Its growth proceeds without interruption. The crystalline individual may attain quite a large size if we know how to nourish it properly—we might say, to fatten it. Very frequently, at a given time, a new particle of the crystal serves in its turn as a primitive nucleus, and becomes the point of departure for a new crystal engrafted upon the first.

Taken from its mother liquor, placed where it cannot be nourished, the crystal, arrested in its growth, falls into a condition of rest not without analogy to that of a seed or of a reviviscent animal. Its evolution is resumed with the return of favourable conditions—the bath of soluble matter.

The crystal is in a relation of continual exchange with the surrounding medium which feeds it. These exchanges are regulated by the state of this medium, or, more exactly, by the state of the liquid stratum which is in immediate contact with the crystals. It loses or it gains in substance if, for example, this layer becomes heated or cooled more rapidly than the crystal. In a general way, it assimilates or dissimilates according as its immediate environment is saturated or diluted. Here, then, we have a kind of mobile equilibrium, comparable, in some measure, to that of the living being.

''Methods of Growth of the Crystal and of the Living Being. Intussusception. Apposition.''—In truth, there seems to be a complete opposition between the crystal and the living being as regards their manner of nutrition and growth. In the one case the method is intussusception; in the other it is apposition. The crystalline individual is all surface. Its mass is impenetrable to the nutritive materials. Since only the