910 LIFE : OUTLINES OF GENERAL BIOLOGY 



those vibrations to us recognisable as heat and sound. Moreover, 

 what we can only sense as light, and which we cannot organically 

 emit, other organisms, e.g. fire-flies, can and do produce. And what 

 to animals seems but visual light is to the green plant photo- 

 synthetic; and even the inorganic magnet has emissive powers in 

 its own electromagnetic way, yet this so far controllable by our 

 intelligence. The discoveries, interpretations, and powers of physical 

 research — as with "wireless", with radio-activity, even to trans- 

 mutation, and with strange properties of other elements, as from 

 those of selenium to the muscle-like responses of tin, etc., to 

 stimulants and depressants long ago demonstrated by Bose, may 

 reasonably be viewed, not as ending, but rather only beginning; 

 while the current analyses of atomic composition and their disclo- 

 sure of vast new ranges of energies is ever extending, and also 

 opening the field to new synthetic speculations, such as Rutot's. 

 Yet how can all this physicochemical progress be in any way 

 related to Life, as we know it ? 



Notice, however, that the most general of biological conceptions — 

 that of integration of some definite continuity of form and function 

 in interaction with environment, briefly (Efo/Ofe), is not neces- 

 sarily limited to our particular terrestrial conditions; but is so far 

 not wholly inconceivable elsewhere and in other conditions also. 

 In like measure neither can we exclude from these the conception 

 of something of psychologic meaning and significance in association 

 with such embodiment and process. But if so, the fields of the 

 Universe open to Life within this most general conception of it may 

 be indeed super-protean. Yet that the advance of science may or 

 may not disclose something of this, who can tell ? 



The more we ourselves already so much sense the Universe, and 

 so far begin to understand it, the less can we imagine our particular 

 senses to be the only vehicles of such recipience. A greater specula- 

 tion was surely Newton's: "It may be that the infinite ether is the 

 sensorium of God!" Such theologic speculation is beyond us; yet 

 the ancient initiative of theologies and their cosmogonies has ever 

 been renewing on the scientific level — from the older astronomers 

 so frequently thinking of "The Plurality of Worlds", and again since 

 the Nebular Hypothesis of Kant and Laplace onwards, even up to 

 discussion, albeit unfavourable, in such a work as Jeans' Cosmogony 

 to-day. There are enough of eagerly speculative students of biology 

 to form a "Societe Bio-Cosmique", with its "Revue" — the papers 

 published in this ranging from "plasmology" outwards into the 

 Universe. The keen and subtly speculative reasonings of Rutot 

 and other workers, upon the data of contemporary physical 

 science, are still more difficult to ignore. 



Thus the human mind is ever and anon renewing such cosmic 

 and biocosmic speculation; and when we recall the marvellous 



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