178 THE ANATOMY OF SCIENCE 



guess the existence of the great domain of or- 

 ganic chemistry. 



One by one we have seen how categories, 

 which at first seem sharply defined, merge one 

 into another, and how every classification when 

 analyzed shows that some imaginary line has 

 been arbitrarily taken as a boundary. What 

 shall we now say to this prime classification of 

 science into its animate and inanimate branches ? 

 Do living beings possess traits which the rocks 

 do not possess, or are the same traits possessed 

 in different degree? Indeed, are all distinctions 

 in kind reducible to distinctions in degree.^ 

 These questions are hard to answer, but never- 

 theless I should like to discuss them a little. 



I have already spoken of living things as 

 cheats in the game of entropy. They alone seem 

 able to breast the great stream of apparently 

 irreversible processes. Those processes tear 

 do^n, living things build up. While the rest of 

 the world seems to move toward a dead level of 

 uniformity, the living organism is evolving new 

 substances and more and more intricate forms. 

 Is it possible, however, that we may find some 

 missing link to connect the animate with the 

 inanimate ? 



Living creatures have been characterized by 



