2o8 From Matter to Man. 



primary laws. The atoms are never at rest. All the ' 

 laws which control their motion are ever operating. 

 A combination of atoms as substance can thus never 

 remain unformed, but must assume one structural 

 condition after another eternally. No thing or body 

 in nature, crystal, plant, or animal is the same for two 

 consecutive seconds : hence there is a certain amount 

 of absurdity in man claiming an individuality and an 

 individual immortality. If in such apparently stable ' 

 crystals as diamonds, present science assures us that 

 the atoms " dash against each other millions of times 

 in a second," what must they not be doing in such 

 unstable compounds as animal cells, or in unformed 

 substance. The evolution of cells therefore from a 

 chance aggregation of suitable material is just as 

 likely to happen as any other formation. It is only 

 nature sprouting. 



Huxley says : — " The process of development of 

 the egg, like that of the seed, is neither more nor less 

 mysterious than that in virtue of which the molecules 

 of water, when it is cooled down to the freezing point, 

 build themselves up into regular crystals."* 



But he might have gone a stage further, and 

 asserted that the spontaneous or automatic forma- 

 tion of animal and vegetal cells also indicates nothing 

 more mysterious in their processes of development 

 from the sexual atoms and molecules. Even as on 

 a frosty night the surface of the ground is whitened 

 with crystals of rime, so in many a river and ocean 



* Introductory Science Primer, p. 92. 



