FOOTNOTES:

FOOTNOTES:[109]Ligondès, quoted by l'Abbé Moreux,Le Problème Solaire, p. 67.[110]Moreux,Le Problème Solaire, p. 133; Ledger,Nineteenth Century, March, 1905.[111]Humboldt,Cosmos, vol. iv., p. 563 (Otté's translation); Maunder,Journal of the British Astronomical Association, vol. viii., p. 174; Max Wolf,Königstuhl Reportfor 1904.[112]Paris Memoirs, 1731, quoted by R. Wolf,Geschichte der Astronomie, p. 695.[113]Popular Astronomy, vol. i., p. 337.[114]Nijland,Astr. Nach., No. 4,008.[115]Astrophysical Journal, vol. xxii., p. 209.[116]Comptes Rendus, 1905, No. 6;Nature, February 23, 1905.[117]Comptes Rendus, tom. cxxi., p. 1134.[118]Sitzungsberichte, Munich, Bd. XXX., p. 197.

[109]Ligondès, quoted by l'Abbé Moreux,Le Problème Solaire, p. 67.

[110]Moreux,Le Problème Solaire, p. 133; Ledger,Nineteenth Century, March, 1905.

[111]Humboldt,Cosmos, vol. iv., p. 563 (Otté's translation); Maunder,Journal of the British Astronomical Association, vol. viii., p. 174; Max Wolf,Königstuhl Reportfor 1904.

[112]Paris Memoirs, 1731, quoted by R. Wolf,Geschichte der Astronomie, p. 695.

[113]Popular Astronomy, vol. i., p. 337.

[114]Nijland,Astr. Nach., No. 4,008.

[115]Astrophysical Journal, vol. xxii., p. 209.

[116]Comptes Rendus, 1905, No. 6;Nature, February 23, 1905.

[117]Comptes Rendus, tom. cxxi., p. 1134.

[118]Sitzungsberichte, Munich, Bd. XXX., p. 197.

LIFE AS THE OUTCOME

Themaking of worlds, we are assured, was not purposeless, and its most obvious purpose to our minds is the preparation of suitable abodes for organic life. No other seems of comparable importance; no other, indeed, comes within the full grasp of our apprehensive intelligence. Yet its limitations must not be forgotten. The human standpoint is not the only one from which the sum of things may be surveyed; and although we be unable to quit it, we can still admit that the view obtainable from it is probably not all-embracing. We only know with certainty that the end which appears to us supreme has, in one case, been successfully attained; how far it was sought to be compassed elsewhere must always remain a matter of speculation.

On our own globe the presence of life is none the less mysterious for being profuse and familiar. We can trace the strange history of its slow unfolding, but the secret of its initiation baffles our utmost scrutiny. The cooled rind of a once molten globe serves as the stage for the drama; beneath it primeval heat still reigns. Temperature rises steadily with descent into the interior of the earth; at a depth of about two miles it must reach the boiling-point of water at the sea-level. This temperature, which is absolutely prohibitive of vitality, was formerly, beyond question, that of the surface. At some long past epoch, accordingly, our future oceans hung suspended as a prodigious envelope of vapour above a hot crust of slag and lava; our teeming planet lay barren; it harboured no promise, no potency, no visible possibility of life.

So it should have remained had the law of continuity been rigidly enforced; but there came a time for a new beginning, and a new beginning was made. A momentous alteration took place; inert Nature was quickened; what had been sterile became all at once fruitful; an immeasurable gulf was bridged,and movement was started along an endless line of advance. That the advance was set on foot and directed by an intelligent Will is the only inference derivable from a rational survey of the known facts.

Life can be studied in its manifestations, not in itself. Attempts to define it have served only to show our inability to 'lift the painted veil.' We can, however, see that its presence is attended by characteristic effects, brought about in harmony with the laws of inorganic nature, although not in blind submission to them. Their operation is somehow restrained, and appears to be subtly though securely guided towards determinate ends prescribed by the vital needs of each animal or plant. This modifying principle unmistakably regulates the economy of every living organism; the cessation of its activity means death.

Science has made no real progress towards solving the enigma of vitality. Its evasiveness becomes, on the contrary, more apparent as inquiry is rendered more exact. Under a laxer discipline of thought the contrast between life and death seemed less glaring. It was easily taken for granted that creeping thingswere engendered by corruption, aid being invoked, if required, from thevirtus cœlestisof the eighth sphere. Thus, the birth of mice from the damp earth was, in the ninth century, held to be signified by the wordmus(=humus);[119]and Van Helmont, at the height of the revival of learning, published without misgiving a recipe for the creation of the same animals.[120]Yet there was already better knowledge to be had for the asking; and Francesco Redi, in 1668, crystallized Harvey's opinion in the celebrated maxim, 'Omne vivum ex vivo.' Its truth is incontrovertible. Challenged and tested again and again, it has as often been vindicated, and may now be said, despite certain anomalous effects of radium on veal broth, to stand outside the legitimate range of debate. 'That life is an antecedent to life,' Lord Kelvin declared in 1871, 'seems to me as sure a teaching of science as the law of gravitation.'[121]

But the succession is not easy to startwithin the terms of a strictly uniformitarian convention. The expedient is tempting, if scarcely satisfactory, of demanding from the past what we dare not claim from the present. Two and a half millenniums ago it was already in vogue. Herodotus dismisses a genealogical embarrassment with the remark, γένοιτο δ'άν πᾶν έν τῶ μακρῶ χρόνω, which may be freely translated, 'In the long run of time anything may happen.' Conditions, we are apt to think, may have been more elastic long ago. The proven impossibility of to-day becomes vaguely thinkable seen through the mist of uncounted yesterdays. 'If it were given to me,' Professor Huxley said,[122]'to look beyond the abyss of geologically recorded time to the still more remote period when the earth was passing through physical and chemical conditions which it can no more see again than a man can recall his infancy, I should expect to be a witness of the evolution of living protoplasm from non-living matter.' To these first vital compounds he attributed a fungoid nature and mode of growth, and the choice deprived his speculation of any plausibility that mightotherwise have belonged to it. Fungi are not self-supporting; they cannot supply themselves with nourishment from the raw materials of the mineral world; they depend upon the hospitality of differently organized beings. They were, then, certainly not among the 'first mercies of nature.' Mr. Herbert Spencer, too, was inclined to regard spontaneous generation as a superannuated process. The leap from the non-vital to the vital, now admitted by the saner kind of biologists to be impracticable, might have been taken, it seemed to him, when 'the heat of the earth's surface was falling through those ranges of temperature at which the higher organic compounds are unstable.' But the 'reason why' is to seek. A sterilized solution is precisely one which has cooled from a high thermal grade; a baked brick is similarly circumstanced. Why should the appearance of life in primeval times have been favoured by a state of things fatal to it here and now?

The essence of the biological crux resides in 'protoplasm.' The word was coined by Von Mohl in 1846, with the object of emphasizing the importance of the substance it signified,which indeed forms the bulk of every organism, animal and vegetable, man, mushroom, and amœba. Huxley rightly termed it 'the physical basis of life,' adding, however, the infelicitous conjecture that its production might have been one of the lucky hits of nature. It would have been a hit of incalculable moment, but of incalculable improbability. 'Odds beyond arithmetic' were against that particular throw coming out of the Lucretian dice-box. The 'primal slime' (to use Oken's phrase) is composed of oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, and carbon, with minute percentages of phosphates and other salts. But these constituents are put together in a highly artificial manner. Eight or nine hundred elementary atoms, in fact, go to the making of one molecule of protoplasm, forming a structure of extreme complexity, most delicately balanced and eminently unstable. It results, accordingly, from the employment of specially directed forces, and stores, for the benefit of the producing organism, the energy expended in its construction. Left to itself, it promptly goes to pieces, and yields back its component particles to their native inorganic sphere. The lawsthere ruling are in truth adverse to the existence of protoplasm; abandoned to their unmitigated action, it perishes. We should then as reasonably suppose that in the geological past rivers flowed uphill as that inorganic nature stumbled blindly upon this wonderful postulate and product of life.

Professor Huxley affirmed life to be 'a property of protoplasm,' the inevitable outcome of 'the nature and disposition of its molecules,' and he sought to cover the absurdity of the dictum by claiming as analogous a case wholly disparate. Water, he argued, has qualities totally unlike those of oxygen or hydrogen, and protoplasm may similarly, by mere intricacy of arrangement, and the evoking of latent affinities, become endowed with the transcendant powers connected with animated existence. 'What better philosophical status, then,' he exclaimed, 'hasvitalitythanaquosity?'[123]'True,' he added, 'protoplasm can only be generated by protoplasm, in a manner that evades our intelligence, but does anybody quite comprehend themodus operandiof an electric spark which traverses a mixture ofoxygen and hydrogen?' The illustration is inapt. The electric spark fulfils no constructive function. It simply agitates the molecules so as to bring their native affinities into play. It acts like a mechanical blow on dynamite. Further, water is a stable compound, because its formation is attended by loss of energy; it represents a plane permanently occupied because reached by a steep descent; but protoplasm is, in this respect, the antitype of water. It needs force for its composition; water needs force for its decomposition. Protoplasm needs force plus a suitable apparatus; it can be turned out only by an artfully adapted machine with a head of steam on. It is thus continually manufactured by plants under the stimulus of light. They provide the apparatus, sunbeams the energy. If the supply of power is cut off, the machinery comes to a halt, protoplasm ceases to be generated, the organism dies of inanition.

Many German biologists find themselves compelled, by the impossibility of explaining vital activities in terms of chemistry or physics, to associate protoplasm with somekind of psychical activity.[124]Individuality, at least, implies an ultra-material principle, and it asserts itself at the very base of the animal creation. An amœba is the simplest of living beings. Formerly called the 'Proteus animalcule,' it is 'everything in turn, and nothing long.' It can be round or radiated, spherical or lenticular, as momentary convenience prescribes. Organs it has none, its limbs are conspicuous by absence, it is 'sans everything' that belongs to the ordinary outfit of an animated creature. Yet such-like nucleated globules of protoplasm have flourished exuberantly during countless ages. Adaptability insured survival. An amœba is at home in almost any environment. What it has not ready-made, it can supply at a moment's notice. Out of any part of its substance it can improvise feelers and tentacles for the capture of its prey, as well as a stomach for its digestion, and it thus effectively goes through the full round of animal economy. Some varieties, too, are noted builders. Those called Foraminifera have the faculty of secretingcarbonate of lime from sea-water, and construct with it fairy dwellings, perforated in all directions to allow of the protrusion of exploratory filaments. Fossil chambered shells of this type are extraordinarily abundant. Their dense conglomeration in the chalk elicited Buffon's exclamation that 'the very dust had been alive!'[125]Thecalcaire grossierof which Paris is built consists mainly of them, and to this day, in oceanic depths, the materials of future capitals are in course of preparation by the monumental industry of these unpretending creatures.

Such as they are, they maintain a status incomparable with that of non-living things. Incomparable, for instance, as regards the water in which they float. The contrast is startling despite its familiarity. An amœba incarnates a purpose; it embodies a spark of personal existence, unconsciously swaying the forces of inorganic nature towards the ends of its own well-being. The subordination is most real, though profoundly mysterious. In the organic and the inorganic worlds the same laws hold good; the same ultimate atoms exert theirpreferences in each; in neither is an uncaused effect possible. A bullet can no more be fired from a gun that has no charge than a man can lift a finger without a corresponding outlay of food-products. Accordingly, while plants store and animals expend energy, plants and animals are equally incompetent for its origination. What they can do is to appropriate and specifically apply it; and herein resides the essence of life. 'It would seem,' Sir George Stokes wrote in 1893,[126]'to be something of the nature of a directing power, not counteracting the action of the physical forces, but guiding them into a determined channel.' What the power is in itself it would be futile to seek to define. We are only sure of its being extra-physical. Matter cannot evolve a principle which disposes of it as its master. Evolution means only the unfolding into self-evidence of something already obscurely present. The 'latent process' (to use a Baconian term) of the hatching of an egg is typical and instructive. Yet it is not the less recondite for being daily conducted before our eyes. A concourse of suns, indeed, fails to impress us with theunutterable wonder of the 'flower in the crannied wall' apostrophized by the last great poet of the nineteenth century.

The two wide kingdoms of life lack a 'scientific frontier.' The boundary-line is ill-marked and irregular. So much so that a few naturalists have set up a neutral zone, or no man's land, inhabited by creatures of mixed or uncertain nature, by plant-animals, or zoophytes in the literal sense of the word. But the expedient avails to shelter ignorance rather than to advance knowledge. For it seems probable that there is no organism so imperfectly characterized as to be genuinely incapable of giving a categorical answer to the question, 'Under which king, Bezonian?' Fungi might, perhaps, on a superficial view, be taken for hybrids. They share the nature of animals so far as to be unable to elaborate their own food, while appearing in other respects to be authentic vegetables. They are, in fact, parasites and scavengers. Not the smallest reason exists for supposing them to constitute a genetic link between the two chief hierarchies. These are, in all likelihood, fundamentally distinct. Only by a gratuitoushypothesis can they be credited with a common ancestor. Each seeks a different kind of perfection; their ideals, so to speak, follow divergent tracks. That the tracks were marked out from the beginning may be safely affirmed; and this implies radical separation. Plants came first, since animals pre-suppose and imperatively require them; the antecedence having quite possibly been by a vast interval of time. On this point, geological evidence, though inconclusive, is suggestive. The Laurentian beds, which are among the very earliest stratified formations, contain no recognisable fossils. They were once supposed to enshrine the remains of a lowly organism dubbedEozöon Canadense; but the markings that simulated animal forms are now known to be of mineral origin. Laurentian graphite, on the other hand, occurs plentifully; and graphite may be described as coal at a more advanced stage of mineralization. Such deposits, we are led to believe, consist of altered vegetable substances; and it seems to follow that these hoary rocks are the burying ground of a profuse succession of virgin forests. That they flourished beneath the sea—were, in fact,composed of algæ—was the opinion of Professor Prestwich,[127]and it is not easily gainsaid.

Primitive animal life was unquestionably marine, and the Huronian strata, which overlie the Laurentian, afford traces of it in a few sponge-spicules, the cast of an annelid, and such-like scanty leavings. Higher up, the Cambrian series swarms with oceanic invertebrates; fishes, the first type of vertebrates, came upon the scene in Silurian times; and so, by a various and surprising progression, life advanced through the ages, until the ascending sequence culminated with a being cast in a diviner mould, who walks the earth, even now, with face uplifted to the stars.

'Natus homo est; illum mundi melioris origoFinxit in effigiem moderantûm cuncta deorum.'

In the vegetable kingdom the vital law of development has wrought with less conspicuous effect. The superiority of recent to ancient floras is more significant than striking. A tree-fern or a sigillaria bears comparison with an oak much better than a trilobite or a plesiosaurus with an eagle, horse, or lion.The geological variations of plants, however, have unmistakably tended to make them more serviceable to man—more serviceable to his material needs, and also more gratifying to his æsthetic instincts. For him, flower-petals were painted and perfumes distilled; for him, the grasses of the prairie laid up stores of sustaining nutriment; in preparation for his advent, choice fruits ripened and reddened under Tertiary sunshine; while the barren and sombre vegetation of the Carboniferous epoch had already done its part by dying down into seams of coal for the eventual supply of power for human industry and warmth for human comfort.

It would be an abuse of our readers' patience to discuss the futile conjecture of an extra-terrestrial origin for life on our globe. The agency, in this connection, of germ-laden aerolites was first invoked by Richter of Dresden; and Lord Kelvin gave currency to the notion by an incidental reference to it in 1871 from the Presidential Chair of the British Association. Its adoption would oblige us to regard the denizens of our planet, fauna and flora alike, as salvage from the wreck of someunknown world in space.Credat Judæus Apella.To our minds, the adventures of Baron Munchausen appear more credible than the pre-natal history of the primal organism implied by this 'wild surmise.' Inquiry into the nature of the supposed organism serves to draw closer the web of embarrassment. The remarkable aridity of meteorites excludes the possibility of its having had an aquatic habitat. Members of the fungoid order are unsuited to act as pioneers, owing to their helplessness in the matter of commissariat; and the spores or lichens or mosses could scarcely be expected to survive the vicissitudes of such a journey as they must have performed if meteor-borne to terrestrial shores. The immigration hypothesis, moreover, even if it were plausible, could not be made useful. Difficulties do not vanish on being pushed into a corner; the problem of life is as formidable in one world as in another; we should not expect to find it easier to square the circle in Mars than Deinostratos found it in Greece; matter, we are convinced, has no more psychical initiative in the system of Arcturus than can be ascribed to it in the system of the sun. Profitlessconjectures may then be dismissed; they do not help us out of the slough of intellectual impotence.

This need not, indeed, be absolute. The determination to regard things mechanically alone renders them unintelligible. Science becomes unscientific when it refuses to be guided by experience; and we have the plainest testimony of consciousness to the working in ourselves of originative faculties independent of, and irrepressible by, physical agencies. Here we hold the clue to the labyrinth. The intimation conveyed is distinct of a Power outside nature, continually and inscrutably acting for order, elevation, and vivification.

FOOTNOTES:[119]Hewitt,Problems of the Age, p. 105.[120]Pasteur,Annales de Chimie et de Physique, tome xliv., p. 6, 1862.[121]Popular Lectures and Addresses, vol. ii., p. 198.[122]Report British Association, 1870, p. 84.[123]Collected Essays, vol. i., p. 153[124]Neumeister,Betrachtungen über das Wesen der Lebenserscheinungen, 1903.[125]Owen,Palæontology, pp. 11, 14.[126]Gifford Lectures, p. 46.[127]Geology, vol. ii., p. 22.

[119]Hewitt,Problems of the Age, p. 105.

[120]Pasteur,Annales de Chimie et de Physique, tome xliv., p. 6, 1862.

[121]Popular Lectures and Addresses, vol. ii., p. 198.

[122]Report British Association, 1870, p. 84.

[123]Collected Essays, vol. i., p. 153

[124]Neumeister,Betrachtungen über das Wesen der Lebenserscheinungen, 1903.

[125]Owen,Palæontology, pp. 11, 14.

[126]Gifford Lectures, p. 46.

[127]Geology, vol. ii., p. 22.

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