Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III SEGMENTATION. ORGANIC AND MECHANICAL Models may be and often have been devised imitating some of the phenomena of division, but none of them have reproduced the peculiarity which characterises divisions of living tissues, that the position of chemical differentiation is determined by those divisions. For example, models of segmentation, whether radial or linear, may be made by the vibration of plates as in the familiar Chladni figures of the physical laboratory, or by the bowing of a tube dusted on the inside with lycopodium powder, and in various other ways. The sand or the powder will be heaped up in the nodes or regions of least movement, and the patterns thus formed reproduce many of the geometrical features of segmentation. But in the segmentations of living things the nodes and internodes, once determined by the dividing forces, would each become the seat of appropriate and distinct chemical processes leading to the differentiation of the parts, and the deposition of the bones, petals, spines, hairs, and other organs in relation to the meristic ground-plan. The " ripples" of meristic division not merely divide but differentiate, and when a "ripple" forks the result is not merely a division but a reduplication of the organ through which the fork runs. An example illustrating such a consequence is that of the half-vertebrae of the Python. On the left side the vertebra is single (Fig. 7) and bears a single rib, but on the right side a division has occurred with the result that two half-vertebrae, each bearing a rib, are formed, one standing in succession to the other. We cannot, indeed, imagine any operation of physiological division carried out in such an organ as a vertebra, passing through a plane at right angles to the long axis of the body, which does not...