hose epitomes are more, some less, worthy; sometimes there
appears only a poor deformity or a feeble-minded attempt, sometimes a
strong and vigorous embodiment of the root idea.

As to its technical continuity of existence and actual mode of
reproduction, I suppose it would be merely fanciful to liken the
"Crown" to those germ-cells or nuclei, whose existence continues
without break, which serve the purpose of collecting and composing the
somatic cells in due season.

Other illustrations of the temporary incarnation of a permanent idea
are readily furnished from the domain of Art; but, after all, the best
analogy to life that I can at present think of is to be found in the
subject of Magnetism.

At one time it was possible to say that magnetism could not be produced
except by antecedent magnetism; that there was no known way of
generating it spontaneously; yet that, since it undoubtedly occurs in
certain rocks of the earth, it must have come into existence somehow,
at date unknown. It could also be said, and it can be said still, that,
given an initial magnet, any number of others can be made, without loss
to the generating magnet. By influence or induction exerted by
proximity on other pieces of steel, the properties of one magnet can be
excited in any number of such pieces,--the amount of magnetism thus
producible being infinite; that is, being strictly without limit, and
not dependent at all on the very finite strength of the original
magnet, which indeed continues unabated. It is just as if magnetism
were not really manufactured at all, but were a thing called out of
some infinite reservoir: as if something were brought into active and
prominent existence from a previously dormant state.

And that indeed is the fact. The process of magnetisation, as conducted
with a steel magnet on other pieces of previously inert steel, in no
case really generates new lines of magnetic force, though it appears to
generate them. We now know that the lines which thus spring into
corporeal existence, as it were, are essentially closed curves or
loops, which cannot be generated; they can be expanded or enlarged to
cover a wide field, and they can be contracted or shrunk up into
insignificance, but they cannot be created, they must be pre-existent;
they were in the non-magnetised steel all the time, though they were so
small and ill-arranged that they had no perceptible effect whatever;
they constituted a potentiality for magnetism;