Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/348

336 the simple sentence, "Our great kingdom appears; we love it," must be expressed as, "The kingdom our dom, which dom is the great dom, the dom appears, we love the dom" (U-bu-kosi b-etu o-bu-kulu bu-ya-bonakala si-bu-tanda). So the saving attained in such a language as English may be easily inferred from the wild luxuriance in analytic distinctions of all tongues in an early stage of development.

It should be added that the gain which comes of the gradual rejection of inflection is a gain not merely in the domain of language alone, it is throughout made possible by mental ascent, and the whole of the progress which it implies is a progress not only in the saving of labor in the intercourse between men, but also in the enlargement and perfection of the ends of that intercourse.

We now return from this brief and highly incomplete account of the various forms of acting to consider the application of our principle to the case of the organic system. That principle admitted, it will be at once obvious that the law of least resistance must be true of all those rearrangements and activities which are imposed upon a living protoplasmic system in the interest of maintenance. If, in other words, such aggregate be impelled by the forces inherent in organic molecules to maintain itself, the various means by which it will maintain itself will be means such as, from the minutest detail of structural rearrangement to the highest organ and process, are best adapted under the whole of the circumstances to accomplish the end of maintenance with the minimum expenditure of energy, and this for the reason that only such means can arise by movement in the direction of the least resistance. It also follows, from the inevitableness of the law and from the character of the organic aggregate as a system of parts, that the means by which maintenance is carried on by such aggregate will undergo progressive improvement, and will therefore illustrate the same gradual advance in the economizing of energy and the perfecting of end as those which are exemplified in the ascent of the human community.

The obvious analogy between the parts of an organic system and the individuals constituting a human society is completely borne out on examination. Whether, in fact, the primitive organic aggregate be viewed as a union of previously separated units, or as an organic mass divided into unit parts that are first likes to each other and only finally differentiated, or as an aggregate that undergoes differentiation of its parts the moment it is sufficiently advanced in complexity to possess organic character, the fact remains that the parts can not constitute an organic system without aiding each other in the work of maintenance. Even if we could regard them as independent of each other, though