If we once had the memory of having been infants (which we had from day to day during infancy), and have lost it, we may well have had other and more intense memories which we have lost no less completely. Indeed, there is nothing more extraordinary in the supposition that the impregnate ovum has an intense sense of its continuity with, and therefore of its identity with, the two impregnate ova from which it has sprung, than in the fact that we have no sense of our continuity with ourselves as infants. If then, there is no _à priori_ objection to this view, and if the impregnate ovum acts in such a manner as to carry the strongest conviction that it must have already on many occasions done what it is doing now, and that it has a vivid though unconscious recollection of what all, and more especially its nearer, ancestral ova did under similar circumstances, there would seem to be little doubt what conclusion we ought to come to. A hen’s egg, for example, as soon as the hen begins to sit, sets to work immediately to do as nearly as may be what the two eggs from which its father and mother were hatched did when hens began to sit upon them. The inference would seem almost irresistible,—that the second egg remembers the course pursued by the eggs from which it has sprung, and of whose present identity it is unquestionably a part-phase; it also seems irresistibly forced upon us to believe that the intensity of this memory is the secret of its easy action. It has, I believe, been often remarked, that a hen is only an egg’s way of making another egg. Every creature must be allowed to “run” its own development in its own way; the egg’s way may seem a very roundabout manner of doing things; but it _is_ its way, and it is one of which man, upon the whole, has no great reason to complain. Why the fowl should be considered more alive than the egg, and why it should be said that the hen lays the egg, and not that the egg lays the hen, these are questions which lie beyond the power of philosophic explanation, but are perhaps most answerable by considering the conceit of man, and his habit, persisted in during many ages, of ignoring all that does not remind him of himself, or hurt him, or profit him; also by considering the use of language, which, if it is to serve at all, can only do so by ignoring a vast number of facts which gradually drop out of mind from being out of sight. But, perhaps, after all, the real reason is, that the egg does not cackle when it has laid the hen, and that it works towards the hen with gradual and noiseless steps, which we can watch if we be so minded; whereas, we can less easily watch the steps which lead from the hen to the egg, but hear a noise, and see an egg where there was no egg. Therefore, we say, the development of the fowl from the egg bears no sort of resemblance to that of the egg from the fowl, whereas, in truth, a hen, or any other living creature, is only the primordial cell’s way of going back upon itself.