194 ON THE ORIGIN OF THE PLANETARY SYSTEM. 



But even men of such free and large order of minds 

 as Lessing and David Strauss could not reconcile them- 

 selves to the thought of a final destruction of the 

 living race, and with it of all the fruits of all past 

 generations. 



As yet we know of no fact, which can be established 

 by scientific observation, which would show that the 

 finer and complex forms of vital motion could exist 

 otherwise than in the dense material of organic life ; 

 that it can propagate itself as the sound-movement 

 of a string can leave its originally narrow and fixed 

 home and diffuse itself in the air, keeping all the time 

 its pitch, and the most delicate shade of its colour-tint ; 

 and that, when it meets another string attuned to it, 

 starts this again or excites a flame ready to sing to the 

 same tone. The flame even, which, of all processes in 

 inanimate nature, is the closest type of life, may 

 become extinct, but the heat which it produces con- 

 tinues to exist indestructible, imperishable, as an in- 

 visible motion, now agitating the molecules of ponder- 

 able matter, and then radiating into boundless space as 

 the vibration of an ether. Even there it retains the 

 characteristic peculiarities of its origin, and it reveals its 

 history to the inquirer who questions it by the spectro- 

 scope. United afresh, these rays may ignite a new 

 flame, and thus, as it were, acquire a new bodily 

 existence. 



