THE BREATH OF LIFE 



A Western university professor in a recent essay 

 sounds quite a different note on this subject from the 

 one that comes to us from Harvard. Says Professor 

 Otto C. Glaser, of the University of Michigan, in a 

 recent issue of the "Popular Science Monthly": 

 "Does not the fitness of living things; the fact that 

 they perform acts useful to themselves in an envi- 

 ronment which is constantly shifting, and often very 

 harsh; the fact that in general everything during 

 development, during digestion, during any of the 

 complicated chains of processes which we find, hap- 

 pens at the right time, in the right place, and to the 

 proper extent; does not all this force us to believe 

 that there is involved something more than mere 

 chemistry and physics? — something, not conscious- 

 ness necessarily, yet its analogue — a vital x?" 



There is this suggestive fact about these recent 

 biological experiments of Dr. Carrel, of the Rocke- 

 feller Institute: they seem to prove that the life of 

 a man is not merely the sum of the life of the myr- 

 iad cells of his body. Stab the man to death, and 

 the cells of his body still live and will continue to 

 live if grafted upon another live man. Probably 

 every part of the body would continue to live and 

 grow indefinitely, in the proper medium. That the 

 cell life should continue after the soul life has ceased 

 is very significant. It seems a legitimate inference 

 from this fact that the human body is the organ or 

 instrument of some agent that is not of the body. 



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