66 Proceedings of Indiana Academy of Science, 
“Tife. like matter, is indestructible. There has always been a 
certain amount of life in this world. and there will always be the 
same amount. You cannot create life; you cannot destroy life: you 
eannot multiply life.” 
Again, he says :— : 
“IT believe our bodies are composed of myriads of infinitesimal 
entities, each of which is a unit of life, which band together to build 
a man.” 
a 
Sir Oliver Lodge does not attempt to tell us what life is, but is quite 
positive that it is not a form of energy, and one of his reasons is that it is 
without limit. Life can create new life through countless generations and 
without limit. While Edison seems equally confident that there is only a 
limited amount of life in the world; that there has always been a certain 
amount, which can be neither increased nor diminished. 
Theories of life and theories of evolution, as I understand them, are close- 
ly interrelated. While evolution is no longer a mere theory, but is an 
accepted and a demonstrated fact, the limits within which it is thus 
demonstrated and acepted are, it seems to me, far from being settled, and 
it is difficult to determine where fact ends and imagination begins. Thus, 
-we are told by the evolutionist of a germ,—an atom of protoplasm that in 
some mysterious way and at some time in the dim and distant past ap- 
peared in primeval slime, and from which all living things have. been 
evolved, and that this germ was the bearer of life to ovr globe. Of course 
evolution, as thus conceived, assumes the pre-existence, somewhere, of this 
initial germ, this life bearer. If we become inquisitive concerning the life 
with which this initial germ was charged, they sidestep, and we are 
blandly informed that evolution does not deal with origins or with begin- 
nings,—it only deals with the way things have gone on since the germ ap- 
peared. I find that where knowledge ends, science does not hesitate to 
guess, surmise and imagine. So various guesses are veutured concerning 
the germ, with its inseparable companion or property, life; among others, 
that the original germ may haye been wafted to us from space on the wings 
of an atom of cosmic dust. But as our earth is itself, relatively to the 
universe, only a speck of dust in illimitable space, this guess only transfers 
the genesis of the germ to some other speck of cosmic dust, and tells us 
nothing of the life it carried. Another guess is that through some myster- 
ious process of nature’s chemistry, protoplasm happened to form, with 
life as one of its inseparable properties, and chemists have been industri- 
ously trying to learn just how this happened and to make artificial proto- 
plasm, and with it, of course, life. As yet I have seen no record that they 
have succeeded. But suppose they do? Will that tell us what life is? 
And now, with much timidity, as against some of these guesses and im- 
aginings of science, I venture my suggestions, which are, of course, only my 
guesses and imaginings. To me it seems a certainty that back of all the 
complexity of that which we call nature, is a supreme intelligence, which is 
made manifest by the operation of law.—law which so far as we ean grasp 
the idea of infinity is infinite in its operation.—law which in the reach of 
its grasp, as well as in the certitude of its control, passes any boundary 
Which we have been able to reach with any instrument yet deyvised,— 
