ccompanying) and redivisions of that original egg-cell. Considering
its potentialities, the egg-cell, seemingly, is as much entitled to be
considered an individual as is the developed organism. Yet it transpires
that the biologist has been able so to manipulate a developing egg-cell,
after its bisection, that the two halves fall apart, and that each half
(now become an independent cell) develops into a complete individual,
instead of the half-individual for which it seemed destined. A
strange trick, that, to play with an individual _Ego_, is it not?
The traditional hydra with its reanimating heads was nothing to this
scientific hydra, which, when bisected bodily, rises up calmly as two
whole bodies.

But even this is not the full measure of the achievement, for it has
been found that in some cases the experiment may be delayed until the
developing egg has made a second bisection, thus reaching the four-cell
stage, when four completely formed individuals emerge from the
dismembered egg. And in the case of certain medusae, success has
attended experiments made at the eight-cell and even at the sixteen-cell
stage of development, the creature which had got thus far on its career
in single blessedness becoming eight or sixteen individuals at the wave
of the enchanted wand--that is to say, the dissecting-needle--of
the biologist. All of which savors of conjury, but is really only
matter-of-fact biological experiment--experiment, however, of which
the implications by no means confine themselves to matters of fact
biological. For clearly the fact that the separated egg-cells grow into
complete individuals shows that Weismann's theory, according to which
one of the cells contained only body plasm, the other only germ plasm,
is quite untenable. Thus the theory of the non-transmissibility of
acquired characters is deprived of its supposed anatomical support and
left quite in the air, to the imminent peril of a school of sociologists
who had built thereon new theories of human progress. Also the question
of the multiplied personalities clearly extends far beyond the field
of the biologist, and must be turned over to the consideration of the
psychologist--if, indeed, it does not fall rather within the scope of
the moralist.

But though it thus often chances that the biologist, while gazing
stoically through his microscope, may discover things in his microcosm
that bear very closely upon the practical interests of the most
unscient