quite enough, and seeing the St. Gothard tunnel plumb on end so that
he could not see the holes of entry and exit, would think the trains
there a kind of caterpillar which went through the mountain by a
pure effort of the will--that enabled them in some mysterious way to
disregard material obstacles and dispense with material means. We
know, of course, that it is not so, and that exemption from the toil
attendant on material obstacles has been compounded for, in the
ordinary way, by the single payment of a tunnel; and so with the
cementing of a bone, our biologists say that the protoplasm, which
is alone living, cements it much as a man might mend a piece of
broken china, but that it works by methods and processes which elude
us, even as the holes of the St. Gothard tunnel may be supposed to
elude a denizen of another world.

The reader will already have seen that the toils are beginning to
close round those who, while professing to be guided by common
sense, still parley with even the most superficial probers beneath
the surface; this, however, will appear more clearly in the
following chapter. It will also appear how far-reaching were the
consequences of the denial of design that was involved in Mr.
Darwin's theory that luck is the main element in survival, and how
largely this theory is responsible for the fatuous developments in
connection alike with protoplasm and automatism which a few years
ago seemed about to carry everything before them.



CHAPTER IX--Property, Common Sense, and Protoplasm (continued)