The Beginnings of Life: Being Some Account of the Nature, Modes of Origin & Transformation of Lower Organisms, Volume 2

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Appleton, 1872 - Life
 

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Page cxxix - Holds such an enmity with blood of man, That, swift as quicksilver, it courses through The natural gates and alleys of the body ; And, with a sudden vigour, it doth posset And curd, like eager droppings into milk, The thin and wholesome blood...
Page 633 - ... his mental constitution may continue to advance and improve, till the world is again inhabited by a single nearly homogeneous race, no individual of which will be inferior to the noblest specimens of existing humanity.
Page 95 - ... other. The forces exercised by each unit on the aggregate, and by the aggregate on each unit, must ever tend towards a balance. If nothing prevents, the units will mould the aggregate into a form in equilibrium with their pre-existing polarities. If contrariwise, the aggregate is made by incident actions to take a new form, its forces must tend to re-mould the units into harmony with this new form ; and to. say that the physiological units are in any degree so...
Page 94 - ... and polarities of its units. The units and the aggregate must act and react on each other. The forces exercised by each unit on the aggregate and by the aggregate on each unit must ever tend towards a balance. If nothing prevents, the units will mould the aggregate into a form in equilibrium with their pre-existing polarities. If, contrariwise, the aggregate is made by incident actions to take a new form, its forces must tend to remould the units into harmony with this new form.
Page 583 - A purposive route of development and change, of correlation and interdependence, manifesting intelligent Will, is as determinable in the succession of races as in the development and organization of the individual. Generations do not vary accidentally, in any and every direction ; but in preordained, definite, and correlated courses.
Page 578 - I may be permitted to say, as some excuse, that I had two distinct objects in view : firstly, to show that species had not been separately created ; and, secondly, that natural selection had been the chief agent of change, though largely aided by the inherited effects of habit, and slightly by the direct action of the surrounding conditions.
Page xciii - The range of variation is so great among Foraminifera as to include not merely the differential characters which systematists proceeding upon the ordinary methods have accounted specific, but also those upon which the greater part of the genera of this group have been founded, and even in some instances those of its orders.
Page xciii - The ordinary notion of species as assemblages of individuals marked out from each other by definite characters that have been genetically transmitted from original proto-types similarly distinguished, is quite inapplicable to this group...
Page 623 - I look at the geological record as a history of the world imperfectly kept, and written in a changing dialect; of this history we possess the last volume alone, relating only to two or three countries. Of this volume, only here and there a short chapter has been preserved ; and of each page, only here and there a few lines.
Page 90 - If we simply substitute the term polarity for the circuitous expression, the power which certain units have of arranging themselves into a special form, we may, without assuming anything more than is proved, use the term organic polarity or polarity of the organic units to signify the proximate cause of the ability which organisms display of reproducing lost parts, or of their having assumed the shape and structure which is peculiar to them.

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