XXII.] ORGANIC AND INORGANIC EVOLUTIONS. 171 



We have arrived, then, at a condition in which the same material 

 may be worked up over and over again. In this way ultimately higher 

 forms might be produced. Now, if to this dissolution, as a means of 

 giving us new material, we add reproduction, then we can go a stage 

 very much further. If we take bi-partition, which was the first 

 method of multiplication, as we know, both in the vegetable and 

 animal world, and then obtain a multiplication of forms by halving 

 instead of the inorganic multiplication of forms by complicating, then 

 we can have a very much increased rate of advance. 



These, then, roughly, are the ideas touching organic evolution 

 which are suggested by the stellar evidence as to inorganic evolution, 

 and the collocation of the simplest forms noted in the hottest stars. 



Let us turn finally to the facts. Biologists are very much more 

 happy than astronomers and chemists, because they can see their units. 

 A chemist professes to believe in nothing which he does not get in a 

 bottle, although I have never yet seen the chemist who was ever happy 

 enough to bottle an atom or a molecule as such ; but the superstition 

 still remains with them, and they profess to believe in nothing that 

 they cannot see. Now, the organic cell, the unit of the biologist, is 

 itself a congeries of subordinate entities, as a molecule is made up of 

 its elementary atoms, manifesting the properties common to living 

 matter in all its forms. 



The characteristic general feature of the vegetable activity of 

 plant forms is their feeding upon gases and liquids, including sea- 

 water. The progress of research greatly strengthens the view that 

 there was a common life plasm, out of which both the vegetable and 

 the animal kingdoms have developed. Be that as it may, it is found 

 that the vegetable grows upon these chemical forms to which I have 

 referred, and the animal feeds either upon the plant or upon other 

 animals which have in their turn fed upon plants ; so that there we 

 get the real chemical structure of the protoplasm, of the real life unit, 

 in our organic evolution. 



Here another question arises. Is there any chemical relation 

 between the chemical composition of the organic cell and the reversing 

 layers of the hottest stars the reversing layer being that part of a 

 star's anatomy by which we define the different genera 1 



When we study the chemical composition of this cell we find it 

 consists of one or more forms of a complex compound of carbon, 

 hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, with water, called protein ; and proto- 

 plasm, the common basis of vegetable and animal life, is thus com- 

 posed. This substance is liable to waste and disintegration by oxidation, 

 and there may be a concomitant reintegration of it by the assimilation 

 of new matter. 



