THE BEGINNINGS OF LIFE. 



mere change of form and destruction, though in past 

 times and even at present amongst the uneducated 

 the former has been often mistaken for the latter. 

 Such misconceptions, however, were natural enough 

 in the past, and even now they are quite in harmony 

 with the defective general knowledge of those who 

 still entertain them: their occurrence does not in the 

 least tend to diminish our well-grounded belief in 

 the indestructibility of matter. 



Of late years, too, experimental investigators as 

 well as purely speculative enquirers have alike been 

 gradually tending towards the recognition of the com- 

 plemental doctrine of the essential oneness and inde- 

 structibility of Force. Matter, they say, is indestructible, 

 and so also is force. Forces are c modes of motion,' 

 and motion is continuous. The very idea of motion, 

 however, cannot be realized in thought except it be 

 in connection with a something which moves though 

 the moving body may be infinitely great or infinitely 

 small. We may imagine molar motion, or motion of 

 a mass, as exhibited by the revolution of a planet or 

 of a sun in its orbit ; and we may imagine molecular 

 motion amongst the particles of a cosmical sether, even 

 though this aether itself may be so subtle as to elude 

 all present means of recognition. But, though motion 

 is inseparable from matter, it is, as we have intimated, 

 continuous or persistent, and, therefore, communicable 

 from particle to particle. Ethereal pulses of solar 

 derivation impinging upon the surface of our earth 



