Of course men point to the fact that modern biology is able to bring about actual and genuine modifications in living creatures. Nothing is further from my intention than to call in question the facts connected with breeding. Daily life sufficiently proves them, and the laboratory demonstrates them under a variety of elegant and surprising forms. But what does one breed? One breeds peculiar conditions under which some life-process or other runs its course--never by any means the process itself--in the selfsame way that the physicist “breeds” the sunbeam as a spectrum, as a polarised ray, as interference, and so forth. Never yet has breeding brought about the transmutation of one life-form into another higher in the scale of being. Now comes the moment when the evolution theorist plays out his last and highest trump. “Very good!” he says. “Let it be that in consequence of our hitherto still defective technique we have not yet succeeded in transmuting one species into a higher, nevertheless, in the facts that have been grouped together under the name of the fundamental biogenetic law and in rudimentary formations, Nature shows us that she herself has actually come this way.” Of a surety the Buddha knew of no fundamental biogenetic law, probably also had no idea of so-called rudimentary formations; but I simply cannot imagine anything that more conclusively proves the truth of his thought than these same facts. For, to him who has learned of the Buddha, these facts do not say that which the modern biologist imputes to them; they testify to the existence of _actual_ associations between living beings right down into what we call the lowest stages. They bring immediately before our eyes the competency of human Kamma to find foothold outside the human kingdom also. As a traveller bears about with him this and the other trace of the dirt of the roads along which he has journeyed, so does the embryo in the various stages of its development exhibit the traces of Samsāra, demonstrate its power to take hold in the heights and in the deeps, exactly according as its Kamma is attuned, and demonstrate also that it _has taken_ hold in the heights and deeps, exactly according as its Kamma _was_ attuned. The embryonal forms show--to use the language of physics--the tremendous amplitude of vibration of the _I_-process. They show _that we all eat out of the one dish_. I am quite prepared to find interpretations such as these evoke nothing but merriment among orthodox men of science. But I address myself as little to the slaves of science as to the slaves outside it. I address myself to men who think with sufficient independence and possess sufficient sense of actuality to allow facts to have unbiassed weight with them. The following is also worthy of consideration:--