We do not know, it is said, by what means the structureless viscid substance which we call protoplasm can build for itself a solid bone; we do not understand how an amœba makes its test; no one understands how anything is done unless he can do it himself; and even then he probably does not know how he has done it. Set a man who has never painted, to watch Rembrandt paint the Burgomaster Six, and he will no more understand how Rembrandt can have done it, than we can understand how the amœba makes its test, or the protoplasm cements two broken ends of a piece of bone. _Ces choses se font mais ne s’expliquent pas_. So some denizen of another planet looking at our earth through a telescope which showed him much, but still not 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_)