BIOLOGY 



THE NATURE OF LIFE REPRODUCTION REGENERATION 

 THE DUCTLESS GLANDS 



By JULIAN S. HUXLEY, M.A. 

 Matter, Living and Lifeless 



FROM the earliest times human beings have pondered over 

 the nature of life. At the beginning they tended to think 

 of all things in terms of themselves to read a life into 

 the wind, a spirit into the river, a soul like their own into the birds 

 and beasts, nor did man even hesitate, as Voltaire so succinctly put 

 it, "to construct God in his own image." But this projection of 

 oneself into the objects of the world around, or anthropomorph- 

 ism, as it is generally called, is, from any scientific or rational 

 point of view, one of the cardinal vices of the mind. To discover 

 the real nature of things, we must discard all prejudices, all purely 

 instinctive ways o( thinking, and labour along the stony but sure 

 path of reason and verification. 



At the outset, it seemed self-evident to anthropomorphism 

 that all living things were alive because endued with some vital 

 principle, some spirit of life, which departed from them at death. 

 But all recent work is making it ever more probable that there is 

 no such specific vital force, and that life is but one name for the 

 manifestations of particular types of matter of very complicated 

 construction. 



By putting a man or an animal into a special chamber, fitted 

 up as a calorimeter, we can measure the amount of energy pro- 

 duced by him in the form of work and of heat ; and we find that, 



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