94 The Bible of Nature 



is; their lines are gone over all the earth. The 

 explorers find no corner where life has not outrun 

 them. Nansen found minute living creatures in 

 ice pools in the Farthest North; the Natural His- 

 tory of the Antarctic already fills several large vol- 

 umes. On the earth and under the earth; in all 

 the waters high and low; on the mountain tops 

 and in the great abysses of the deep sea; free in 

 the air and fettered in the penetralia of other 

 creatures, life abounds. What a long gamut of 

 activity there is, from the dull sentience of many 

 of the simplest, which seem sometimes to have no 

 more than one distinct action or reaction, and 

 the sleep-life of the higher plants, to the complex 

 instinctive routine of ants and bees, and the intelli- 

 gent behavior familiar to us in the big-brained 

 educable birds and mammals. How difficult it 

 is to find what is essentially characteristic of them 

 all as distinguished from the inanimate creation. 

 But that is what we must now try to do.^ 



Characteristics of Livingness. — The great oak is 

 instinct with life in every leaf and twig and root- 

 let, it is a whirlpool of whirlpools of intensely 

 active corpuscles, yet it outlives many generations 

 of men, and stands, like the tree of Igdrasil, as an 

 emblem of eternal life. What a contrast to the 

 earth beneath our feet, which we usually call 



iSee J. Arthur Thomson, "The Science of Life," 

 Blackie & Sons, Glasgow, 1899. 



