said, goes about masked behind the clothes or habits which it has
fashioned. It has habited itself as animals and plants, and we have
mistaken the garment for the wearer--as our dogs and cats doubtless
think with Giordano Bruno that our boots live when we are wearing
them, and that we keep spare paws in our bedrooms which lie by the
wall and go to sleep when we have not got them on.

If, in answer to the assertion that the osseous parts of bone are
non-living, it is said that they must be living, for they heal if
broken, which no dead matter can do, it is answered that the broken
pieces of bone do not grow together; they are mended by the
protoplasm which permeates the Haversian canals; the bones
themselves are no more living merely because they are tenanted by
something which really does live, than a house lives because men and
women inhabit it; and if a bone is repaired, it no more repairs
itself than a house can be said to have repaired itself because its
owner has sent for the bricklayer and seen that what was wanted was
done.

We do not know, it is said, by what means the structureless viscid
substance which we call protoplasm can build for itself a solid
bone; we do not understand how an amoeba makes its test; no one
understands how anything is done unless he can do it himself; and
even then he probably does not know how he has done it. Set a man
who has never painted, to watch Rembrandt paint the Burgomaster Six,
and he will no more understand how Rembrandt can have done it, than
we can understand how the amoeba makes its test, or the protoplasm
cements two broken ends of a piece of bone. Ces choses se font mais
ne s'expliquent pas. So some denizen of another planet looking at
our earth through a telescope which showed him much, but still not