Organisms and Their Origin 123 



Apartness of Living Creatures. — In thinking over 

 this difficult question there are two cautions which 

 should be borne in mind. We must not exag- 

 gerate the apartness of the animate from the in- 

 animate, nor must we depreciate it. On the one 

 hand, we must recognize that modern progress in 

 chemistry and physics, has given us a much more 

 "vital" conception of what has been hbelled as 

 ''dead matter"; we must not belittle the powers of 

 growth and regrowth which we observe in crystals, 

 the series of form-changes through which many 

 inorganic things, even drops of water, may pass; 

 the behavior of ferments; the intricate internal ac- 

 tivity of even the dust. When we consider, too, 

 such phenomena as "latent life," and "local life," 

 and the relatively great simplicity of many forms 

 and kinds of life, we do not find it easy to discover 

 absolute, universal, and invariable criteria to dis- 

 tinguish between animate and inanimate systems, 

 or between the quick and the dead. To some 

 extent, also, the artificial synthesis of complex or- 

 ganic compounds, and the ingenious construction 

 of "artificial cells" which closely mimic the struc- 

 ture of living cells, though no one supposes that 

 they are in the faintest degree "alive," serve to 

 lessen the gap which seems at first so wide. 



There is certainly some interest in the artificial 

 foam-cells of Quincke and Biitschli, in Dubois' 

 "vacuolids" or "eobes," in Butler Burke's "radi- 



