This body, then, which hovered before him, this individual and living I, was a monstrous multiplicity of breathing and self-nourishing individuals, which, through organic conformation and adaptation to special ends, had parted to such an extent with their essential individuality, their freedom and living immediacy, had so much become anatomic elements that the functions of some had become limited to sensibility toward light, sound, contact, warmth; others only understood how to change their shape or produce digestive secretions through contraction; others, again, were developed and functional to no other end than protection, support, the conveyance of the body juices, or reproduction. There were modifications of this organic plurality united to form the higher ego: cases where the multitude of subordinate entities were only grouped in a loose and doubtful way to form a higher living unit. The student buried himself in the phenomenon of cell colonies; he read about half-organisms, algae, whose single cells, enveloped in a mantle of gelatine, often lay apart from one another, yet were multiple-cell formations, which, if they had been asked, would not have known whether to be rated as a settlement of single-celled individuals, or as an individual single unit, and, in bearing witness, would have vacillated quaintly between the I and the we. Nature here presented a middle stage, between the highly social union of countless elementary individuals to form the tissues and organs of a superior I, and the free individual existence of these simpler forms; the multiple-celled organism was only a stage in the cyclic process, which was the course of life itself, a periodic revolution from procreation to procreation. The act of fructification, the sexual merging of two cell-bodies, stood at the beginning of the upbuilding of every multiple-celled individual, as it did at the beginning of every row of generations of single elementary forms, and led back to itself. For this act was carried through many species which had no need of it to multiply by means of proliferation; until a moment came when the non-sexually produced offspring found themselves once more constrained to a renewal of the copulative function, and the circle came full. Such was the multiple state of life, sprung from the union of two parent cells, the association of many non-sexually originated generations of cell units; its growth meant their increase, and the generative circle came full again when sex-cells, specially developed elements for the purpose of reproduction, had established themselves and found the way to a new mingling that drove life on afresh.
Our young adventurer, supporting a volume of embryology on the pit of his stomach, followed the development of the organism from the moment when the spermatozoon, first among a host of its fellows, forced itself forward by a lashing motion of its hinder part, struck with its forepart against the gelatine mantle of the egg, and bored its way into the mount of conception, which the protoplasm of the outside of the ovum arched against its approach. There was no conceivable trick or absurdity it would not have pleased nature to commit by way of variation upon this fixed procedure. In some animals, the male was a parasite in the intestine of the female. In others, the male parent reached with his arm down the gullet of the female to deposit the semen within her; after which, bitten off and spat out, it ran away by itself upon its fingers, to the confusion of scientists, who for long had given it Greek and Latin names as an independent form of life. Hans Castorp lent an ear to the learned strife between ovists and animalculists: the first of whom asserted that the egg was in itself the complete little frog, dog, or human being, the male element being only the incitement to its growth; while the second saw in a spermatozoon, possessing head, arms, and legs, the perfected form of life shadowed forth, to which the egg performed only the office of “nourisher in life’s feast.” In the end they agreed to concede equal meritoriousness to ovum and semen, both of which, after all, sprang from originally indistinguishable procreative cells. He saw the single-celled organism of the fructified egg on the point of being transformed into a multiple-celled organism, by striation and division; saw the cell-bodies attach themselves to the lamellae of the mucous membrane; saw the germinal
