If one asks: “But could not this also happen outside a maternal womb?” I reply: “I do not know.” It certainly does not happen with man. It happens with cold-blooded creatures, with dogs, and so forth. In the botanical gardens at Peradeniya, Ceylon, in the climate the most perfect in the world for vegetation, there are several trees--the _Bertholetia excelsa_ of Brazil, for example--which, despite the similarity of the climate to that of their native haunts, as yet have resisted all attempts to propagate them. It simply is so! Actuality lays down its own laws because it is itself law. Science can do nothing but hobble along as best she may in the wake of all these facts, and endeavour to accommodate herself to them. But what bears witness in favour of the Buddha-thought is precisely the impossibility of getting fecundation to take place outside a womb, or of bringing it about by introducing sperm into the uterus by artificial means, of which latter proceeding a single, not altogether unequivocal instance is reported by an American gynæcologist. What is needed is the living energy which for a limited period vibrates in the material like the energy in the plucked string of a lute. It is just this vibrating energy in it which first makes the material to be material, _i.e._ the thing that is capable of a unique attunement. And here we come to the most important question of all:-- “Is a human Kamma always obliged to take fresh hold precisely of human _I_-material? Would it not be possible for once, that human Kamma should be attuned to animal material or reverse wise, animal Kamma to human material?” To this the answer is: Kamma can take hold only where there is material that itself is the form of a Kamma. How far down in the kingdom of living creatures this material extends cannot be said any more than in the case of a flame can be indicated exactly how far the circle of its radiance extends, the precise limit stated at which it gives place to darkness. And just as, despite this, the flame has a definite circle of radiance, so Kamma has a definite sphere of operation, albeit no science--such as zoology or anthropology and so forth--is in a position to establish this thesis. Kamma takes hold where it can take hold--that is to say, where in the material of procreation there vibrate energies to which it is uniquely attuned; and in the scale of living creatures it reaches just as far as it is able to reach. In the Jatakas, the birth-stories of the Buddha, we see him in Samsāra ranging this whole scale through from the lowest stages of the animal kingdom right up to the worlds of the gods, ever and again planting foot there where the Kamma was attuned at the moment of collapse.