WHAT IS PHYSICAL LIFE 



accounting for the really basic fact about 

 life, namely, Reproduction, because by its 

 processes vital reproduction excludes its 

 being classified with anything else on 

 earth. Thus a whale is, to be sure, a large 

 living thing whose circulation, respiration, 

 muscular and nervous activities illustrate 

 many physico-chemical laws. But how 

 can these laws account for the biological 

 history of this animal himself? As we 

 have already stated in the preceding chap- 

 ter he began his individual existence, as 

 every other living thing, animal or plant, 

 large or small, has to begin, as a micro- 

 scopic unicellular entity. It is the be- 

 ginning of things which settles the nature 

 of things, and when a whale begins, he is 

 certainly a whale, though 1,500,000 such 

 whales might be got into a space not larger 

 than a pin's head. He also is then noth- 

 ing else than a whale, and by no possibility 

 can he grow into a fish any more than he 

 40 



