Julian Huxley
Published: 2013-09
Total Pages: 40
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This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1912 edition. Excerpt: ... one of them taken singly) it was the first thing evolved to which individuality could adhere. It was like Benjamin Franklin's kite, bringing lightning down from heaven, but it did more than that, for it provided a permanent resting-place on earth where individuality could stay, could gather strength and develop upwards. For this reason it is right to speak of the cell as the foundation of animal individuality. How in later times the relation of the cell to the individual is modified must be left for the present on one side (see pp. 137, 150): we must now retrace our footsteps and see how others have defined the animal individual. CHAPTER III SOME OTHER DEFINITIONS OF ANIMAL INDIVIDUALITY From time to time various definitions of individuality have been given by zoologists. Most of them are framed with little reference to the philosophical idea of individuality, and the result has often been that the term individual as defined by them, though applicable to some reality of zoology, can no longer be used without absurdities in its more popular but more correct and more original sense. One of the most widespread definitions considers the individual as "the total product of a single impregnated ovum" (8 a, p. 59), that is to say as the sum of the forms which appear between one sexual act and the next. This would make all the polyps in a colony of hydroids, all the separate polyps budded off by a fresh-water hydra, all the summer generations of the aphis, together constitute but a single individual. Of recent years it has not found so much favour, but Calkins (2) has urged that it should apply to protozoa, declaring that all the separate cells arising by continued division from a single parent between one sexual act (conjugation) and the next, ...