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it offers by the vicious process of a reduction and concealment of terms. We may as well call the living body as a whole a gemmule, and endow it offhand with all living powers, as to evoke these infinitesimals, and clothe them with a complete suit of supersensual properties. We hide in this way the problem in the dust of thought we have raised about it, we do not solve it. St. George Mivart, in his Genesis of Species, has pointed out another and more narrow series of objections to which this theory is exposed it is enough for our purposes to see that it has no foundation in known facts, that it explains nothing, that it adds complexity to complexity.

The theory of physiological units by Mr. Spencer, has a slight advantage of simplicity over that of Mr. Darwin. It supposes the living body to be pervaded by indefinitely minute and numerous physiological units, each of which has a tendency to repeat the whole organism. The same objections hold as before. We have names and obscure ideas, but no things, and no correspondence with any known thing. The supposition has no working power, it is entangled at once in its own intolerable perplexity. We might as well try to conceive each brick, not merely in one building, but in an indefinitely extended series of buildings, endowed with constructive properties by which it should take its own place and help to assign every other brick its place in the successive structures, and should, at the same time, pass its properties on to all other bricks, taking part in this reel.

Not only is this theory of physiological units absurdly