Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 29.djvu/415

Rh study of which is embryology. And who knows whether the embryology of organic bodies, that science still wrapped in so much darkness, may not be illuminated with an unanticipated light when it shall be able to take for the basis of its investigations the results furnished by the embryology of inorganic bodies? MM. Monnier and Vogt have already imitated, by means of inorganic salts reacting upon one another, the forms of organic cells, and in a work, the summary of which was published in 1882 in the "Comptes Rendus" of the French Academy of Sciences, under the title of "The Artificial Production of the Forms of the Organic Elements," they have examined in detail these extremely delicate phenomena which carry us back toward the elementary origin of beings.

All beings are subject to certain general laws. Experiments in supersaturation show the action of continuity exercised by the parent upon the descendant which resembles it, and the conditions of existence, if not identical, are at least comparable for all. The crystal, in the solution into which it is plunged, increases by taking up, by means of a labor inherent to its nature, the particles which are suitable to it, and which become thus the food upon which it is supported. The struggle for existence is universal. Henri Sainte-Claire Deville announced the application of this thought to the mineral kingdom when, pointing to the iron tubes in his laboratory in which crystals were alternately heated and cooled, he remarked, sententiously, "The large crystals eat up the little ones." All bodies are subject to the action of ambient conditions. Among these incessant variations, these reciprocal influences of the medium upon the being and of the being upon the medium, are certain situations of greater stability, or positions of momentary equilibrium in which the body seems to persist, when an effort, a more considerable change, is needed to displace it. This equilibrium is not absolute. Susceptibility constantly exists, but it is manifested more or less clearly, so that we can define mineralogy as the study of the effects produced by different causes upon minerals. Sometimes a relaxation is apparent, a comparative retardation, a slumber, a lethargy, a catalepsy, a condition of real or apparent death. It is hard to express our idea by using such words as death or destruction, which possess a common acceptation that we are obliged, perforce, to stretch. "If we dry or deprive of heat certain inferior beings, frogs, aquatic insects, or some eggs," says Claus, in his "Zoölogy," "we can interrupt the vital functions for months and years, and still restore the life by returning the water and the heat. While there are some seeds that lose their germinating qualities after a few days, melon-seeds and beans are known to have grown after thirty or forty years, and even seeds of heliotrope and lucern that were found in the Gallo-Roman tombs, and were therefore fifteen or sixteen hundred years old, have been made to grow." The crystal, withdrawn from the mother-solution, and deprived of food, ceases to develop; it continues the same