322 Life and Immortality. 



animal existences. Low down in the scale of life are forms 

 about which it cannot be predicated these are plants and these 

 are animals. Scientists are unable to say where plant-life 

 ends and animal-life begins. No hard-and-fast line can be 

 drawn beween the two vast kingdoms of life, and it is often 

 wholly impossible to decide whether we are dealing with an 

 animal or a plant. There can be no question that the earli- 

 est life was vegetable by nature, and that its habitat was the 

 primeval ocean. This is no less the teaching of science than 

 that of the Scriptures. From some such life, originating 

 de novo as the Spirit of God passed over the waters, the two 

 great branches of animate nature may have taken their rise. 

 What the form of this life may have been, whether cellular 

 or a mere mass of formless protoplasm, the mind of man 

 cannot asseverate. It is a mystery, and will doubtless ever 

 remain as such to finite intelligence. That this life, no mat- 

 ter how apparently insignificant it must have been, breathed 

 in its own simple fashion, that is, by the coetaneous opera- 

 tion of the ruack chayim and the neshemet chayim upon its 

 simple substance in accordance with natural law, there can 

 be no dispute. Breathing is not always conditioned by the 

 existence of nostrils. Plants respire, or, in other words, 

 take in carbonic acid from the air through their stomata, or 

 mouths, which they separate into its components of carbon 

 and oxygen, appropriating the former, which they build into 

 solid matter, but usually throwing off the latter into the 

 great receptacle of atmosphere from which it was extracted. 

 Even a moner, which has no distinction of parts, may be 

 said to breathe, but it breathes by means of its whole exter- 

 nal surface, for neshemeh and ruach are as necessary to it as 

 to man himself. It will thus be obvious that plants are liv- 

 ing, breathing frames, or bodies of life, and hence are as 

 much entitled to be considered as living souls as animals 

 are. Let but God withdraw his ruach , or spirit, from them, 

 and they die and to their dust return. Surely no more could 

 be predicated of animals. 



