566 THE PLANT’S PLACE IN NATURE 
tions it again becomes active. We should remember, how- 
ever, that even granting in such cases the appearance of life 
in a body which before was lifeless, it was a reappearance; 
and this previous life again confronts us with the original 
problem. We still must ask, Is there not some profound 
difference between a body in which life reappears and one 
in which life never has appeared? 
To this question the doubter may reply: “‘Let us go back 
then to the first of living things. Evolutionists suppose this 
to have come from something that had never been alive 
before. Does not the change here assumed imply that the 
inorganic realm merges so gradually into the organic that 
some organisms differ no more from some minerals than one 
organism or one mineral does from another?”’ Not at all. 
It does not follow just because one thing is transformed into 
another that the new may not be profoundly different from 
the old. An evolutionist, therefore, is free to believe that 
when the first living creature appeared upon the earth, a 
form of existence essentially different from any that had 
been here before, came into the world. We may suppose 
that as the earth was cooling from its molten state there 
were formed according to chemical and physical laws acting 
under conditions not since repeated, aggregations of com- 
pounds like those now found only in the organic realm; and 
that as soon as the temperature became favorable these 
aggregations became alive, exhibiting the activities of a 
living thing much as a revived creature would do. In saying 
this, however, we have admitted only that life may have 
appeared as soon as the conditions required for its manifes- 
tation were present. We have not implied that life is a 
product of the chemical and physical properties of matter, 
however necessary certain material conditions are to the 
manifestation of life in an organism. It may be freely ad- 
mitted that chemically and physically considered certain 
lifeless bodies are indistinguishable from certain living ones; 
that indeed one and the same body may pass from one condi- 
tion to the other without change of properties, and that 
when alive all the activities of its parts are describable in 
chemical and physical terms. All this would necessarily 
