the same, with the single difference as to actual environment.

The germ in the seed is capable of assimilating, by well-determined and
thoroughly specialized processes, the nutrient matter contained in its
environment, precisely as the "primordial germ" develops under its
environing conditions. From the moment they strike their rootlets into the
ground, the processes of development and growth are the same. The only
point, however, necessary to make in this connection, is, that when we go
back to the first living organism of a species--its primordially developed
form--we necessarily reach environing conditions within which there is no
such thing as a germ-cell with an exterior environment corresponding to
the testa of seeds, or to any conceivable notion we may have of seeds
themselves.

At this point--one not merely theoretical, or speculatively possible only,
but absolutely fixed and determinable in our backward survey of the vital
forces of nature--we find individual parentage lost in a natural matrix,
or in the vital principle implanted as a "primordium," in the earth
itself. To this inevitable induction of Dr. Harvey we are all driven in
the end, by those intuitive processes of reasoning which are hardly less
conclusive than mathematical induction itself. We may call these
"primordia viventium" plastide particles, bioplasts, vital units, or
whatsoever we will,--the name is nothing, the working process is
everything. Scientific speculation accomplishes nothing, therefore, by its
new terminology, except it be to confound the ignorant and astonish the
wise. To call the homogeneous basis of an egg "blastima," and its germinal
point a "blastid," is all well enough in its way; but it adds no new
knowledge, nor additional wealth of language, wherewith to predicate vital
theories, whether they relate to the progeny of a hen-coop or the lair of
a tiger in an Indian jungle.