Some of those epitomes are more, some less, worthy; sometimes there appears only a poor deformity or a feeble-minded attempt, sometimes a strong and vigorous embodiment of the root idea.
As to its technical continuity of existence and actual mode of reproduction, I suppose it would be merely fanciful to liken the "Crown" to those germ-cells or nuclei, whose existence continues without break, which serve the purpose of collecting and composing the somatic cells in due season.
Other illustrations of the temporary incarnation of a permanent idea are readily furnished from the domain of Art; but, after all, the best analogy to life that I can at present think of is to be found in the subject of Magnetism.
At one time it was possible to say that magnetism could not be produced except by antecedent magnetism; that there was no known way of generating it spontaneously; yet that, since it undoubtedly occurs in certain rocks of the earth, it must have come into existence somehow, at date unknown. It could also be said, and it can be said still, that, given an initial magnet, any number of others can be made, without loss to the generating magnet. By influence or induction exerted by proximity on other pieces of steel, the properties of one magnet can be excited in any number of such pieces,—the amount of magnetism thus producible being infinite; that is, being strictly without limit, and not dependent at all on the very finite strength of the original magnet, which indeed continues unabated. It is just as if magnetism were not really manufactured at all, but were a thing called out of some infinite reservoir: as if something were brought into active and prominent existence from a previously dormant state.
And that indeed is the fact. The process of magnetisation, as conducted with a steel magnet on other pieces of previously inert steel, in no case really generates new lines of magnetic force, though it appears to generate them. We now know that the lines which thus spring into corporeal existence, as it were, are essentially closed curves or loops, which cannot be generated; they can be expanded or enlarged to cover a wide field, and they can be contracted or shrunk up into insignificance, but they cannot be created, they must be pre-existent; they were in the non-magnetised steel all the time, though they were so small and ill-arranged that they had no perceptible effect whatever; they constituted a potentiality for magnetism; they existed as molecular closed curves or loops, which, by the operation called magnetisation, could, some of them, be opened out into loops of finite area and spread out into space, where they are called "lines of force." They then constitute the region called a magnetic field, which remains a seat of so-called "permanent" magnetic activity, until by lapse of time, excessive heat, or other circumstance, they close up again; and so the magnet, as a magnet, dies. The magnetism itself, however, has not really died, it has a perpetual existence; and a fresh act of magnetisation can recall it, or something indistinguishable from it, into manifest activity again; so that it, or its equivalent, can once more interact with the rest of material energies, and be dealt with by physicists, or subserve the uses of humanity. Until that time of re-appearance its existence can only be inferred by the thought of the mathematician: it is indeed a matter of theory, not necessarily recognised as true by the practical man.
Our present view is that the act of magnetisation consists in a re-arrangement and co-ordination of previously existing magnetic elements, lying dormant, so to speak, in iron and other magnetic materials; only a very small fraction of the whole number being usually brought into activity at any one time, and not necessarily always the same actual set. Only a small and indiscriminate selection is made from all the molecular loops; and it can be a different group each time, or some elements may be different and some the same, whenever a fresh individual or magnet is brought into being.
All this can be said concerning the old process of magnetisation—the process as it was doubtless familiar to the unknown discoverer of the lodestone, to the ancient users of the mariner's compass, and to Dr Gilbert of Colchester, the discoverer of the magnetised condition of the Earth.
But within the nineteenth century a fresh process of magnetisation has been discovered, and this new or electrical process is no longer obviously dependent on the existence of antecedent magnetism, but seems at first sight to be a property freshly or spontaneously generated, as it were. The process was discovered as the result of setting electricity into motion. So long as electricity was studied in its condition at rest on charged conductors, as in the old science of electrostatics or frictional electricity, it possessed no magnetic properties whatever, nor did it encroach on the magnetic domain: only vague similarities in the phenomena of attraction and repulsion aroused attention. But directly electricity was set in motion, constituting what is called an electric current, magnetic lines of force instantly sprang into being, without the presence of any steel or iron; and in twenty years they were recognised. These electrically generated lines of force are similar to those previously known, but they need no matter to sustain them. They need matter to display them, but they themselves exist equally well in perfect vacuum.
How did they manage to spring into being? Can it be said that they too had existed previously in some dormant condition in the ether of space? That they too were closed loops opened out, and their existence thus displayed, by the electric current?
That is an assertion which might reasonably be made: it is not the only way of regarding the matter, however, and the mode in which a magnetic field originates round the path of a moving charge—being generated during the acceleration-period by a pulse of radiation which travels with the speed of light, being maintained during the steady-motion period by a sort of inertia as if in accordance with the first law of motion, and being destroyed only by a return pulse of re-radiation during a retardation-period when the moving charge is stopped or diverted or reversed—all this can hardly be fully explained until the intimate nature of an electric charge has been more fully worked out; and the subject now trenches too nearly on the more advanced parts of Physics to be useful any longer as an analogue for general readers.