Passing on to the higher animal life—­how do eggs grow into chickens?  What is the power in the germ of the egg?  Can the germ think, and plan, and move, and grow into a chicken?  Or is the Will at work there?  And what is true in this case, is true of the birth and growth of all animal life—­all animal life develops from a single germ cell.  How, and Why?

There is a mental energy resident in the germ cell—­of this there can be no doubt.  And that mental energy is the Creative Will ever manifesting.  Listen to these words from Huxley, the eminent scientist.  He says: 

“The student of Nature wonders the more and is astonished the less, the more conversant he becomes with her operations; but of all the perennial miracles she offers to his inspection, perhaps the most worthy of his admiration is the development of a plant or of an animal from its embryo.  Examine the recently laid egg of some common animal, such as a salamander or a newt.  It is a minute spheroid in which the best microscope will reveal nothing but a structureless sac, enclosing a glairy fluid, holding granules in suspension.  But strange possibilities lie dormant in that semi-fluid globule.  Let a moderate supply of warmth reach its watery cradle, and the plastic matter undergoes changes so rapid, and so purposelike in their succession, that one can only compare them to those operated by a skilled modeller upon a formless lump of clay.  As with an invisible trowel, the mass is divided and subdivided into smaller and smaller portions, until it is reduced to an aggregation of granules not too large to build withal the finest fabrics of the nascent organism.  And, then, it is as if a delicate finger traced out the line to be occupied by the spinal column, and moulded the contour of the body; pinching up the head at one end, the tail at the other, and fashioning flank and limb into due salamanderine proportions, in so artistic a way that, after watching the process hour by hour, one is almost involuntarily possessed by the notion that some more subtle aid to vision than the achromatic lens would show the hidden artist, with his plan before him, striving with skilful manipulation to perfect his work.

“As life advances and the young amphibian ranges the waters, the terror of his insect contemporaries, not only are the nutritious particles supplied by its prey (by the addition of which to its frame growth takes place) laid down, each in its proper spot, and in due proportion to the rest, as to reproduce the form, the color, and the size, characteristic of the parental stock; but even the wonderful powers of reproducing lost parts possessed by these animals are controlled by the same governing tendency.  Cut off the legs, the tail, the jaws, separately or all together, and as Spallanzani showed long ago, these parts not only grow again, but the new limb is formed on the same type as those which were lost.  The new jaw, or leg, is a newt’s, and never by any accident more like that of a frog’s.”