^260 FRAGMENTS OF SCIENCE 



fer themselves as tlie nutriment of the vegetable world, so 

 does the latter, which contains no constituent not found 

 in inorganic nature, offer itself to the animal world. 

 Mixed with certain inorganic substances — water, for ex- 

 ample — the vegetable constitutes, in the long run, the sole 

 sustenance of the animal. Animals may be divided into 

 two classes, the first of which can utilize the vegetable 

 world immediately, having chemical forces strong enough 

 to cope with its most refractory parts; the second class 

 use the vegetable world mediately; that is to say, after its 

 finer portions have been extracted and stored up by the 

 first. But in neither class have we an atom newly created. 

 The animal world is, so to say, a distillation through the 

 vegetable world from inorganic nature. 



From this point of view all three worlds would con- 

 stitute a unity, in which I picture life as immanent every- 

 where. Nor am I anxious to shut out the idea that the 

 life here spoken of may be but a subordinate part and 

 function of a Higher Life, as the living, moving blood is 

 subordinate to the living man. I resist no such idea as 

 long as it is not dogmatically imposed. Left for the hu- 

 man mind freely to operate upon, the idea has ethical 

 vitality; but, stiffened into a dogma, the inner force dis- 

 appears, and the outward yoke of a usurping hierarchy 

 takes its place. 



The problem before us is, at all events, capable of 

 definite statement. We have on the one hand strong 

 grounds for concluding that the earth was once a molten 

 mass. We now find it not only swathed by an atmos- 

 phere, and covered by a sea, but also crowded with living 

 things. The question is, How were they introduced? 

 Certainty may be as unattainable here as Bishop Butler 



