THe Microscope. — 255 
ture, changing the dead, the unorganized, and not-living into 
definite forms of life? 
Now, this is a profound question, and that it is a difficult 
one there can be no doubt. But that if is a question for our 
laboratories is certain. And aftercareful and prolonged exper- 
iment and research, the legitimate question to be asked is: Do 
we find that in our laboratories and in the obscured processes 
of nature now that the not-living can be, without the interven- 
tion of living things, changed into that which lives? To that 
question the vast majority of practical biologists answer with- 
out hesitancy, ‘No, we have no facts to justify such a conclu- 
sion.’ Professor Huxley shall represent them. He says: ‘ The 
properties of living matter distinguish it from all other kinds of 
things :’ and he continues, ‘ the present state of our knowledge 
furnishes us with no link between living and the not-living.’ 
Now let us carefully remember that the great doctrine of 
Charles Darwin has furnished biology with a magnificent gen- 
eralization—one, indeed, which stands upon so broad a basis 
that great masses of detail and many needful interlocking facts 
are of necessity relegated to the quiet workers of the present 
and the earnest laborers of the,years to come. But it is a doc- 
trine which cannot be shaken. The constant and universal 
action of variation, the struggle for existence, and the ‘ survival 
of the fittest,’ few who are competent to grasp will have the 
temerity to doubt. And to many, that which lies within it as a 
doctrine and forms the fibre of its fabric, is the existence of a 
continuity, an unbroken stream of unity running from the base 
to the apex of the entire organic series. The plant and the an- 
imal, the lowliest organized and the most complex, the min- 
utest and the largest, are related to each other so as to consti- 
tute one majestic organic whole. Now, to this splendid conti- 
nuity practical biology presents no adverse fact. All our most 
recent and most accurate knowledge confirms it. 
But the question is—Does this continuity terminate now in 
the living series, and is there then a break—a sharp, clear dis- 
continuity, and beyond another realm immeasurably less en- 
dowed, known as the realm of Not-life? Or, does what has 
been taken as the clear-cut boundary of the vital area, when 
more deeply searched, reveal the presence of a force at present 
