THE BREATH OF LIFE 



ence: When vitality is gone, you cannot recall it, or 

 reproduce it by your chemistry; but you can recom- 

 bine the two gases in which you have decomposed 

 water, any number of times, and get your aquos- 

 ity back again; it never fails; it is a power of chem- 

 istry. But vitality will not come at your beck; it is 

 not a chemical product, at least in the same sense 

 that water is; it is not in the same category as the 

 wetness or liquidity of water. It is a name for a 

 phenomenon — the most remarkable phenomenon 

 in nature. It is one that the art of man is powerless 

 to reproduce, while water may be made to go 

 through its cycle of change — solid, fluid, vapor, 

 gas — and always come back to water. Well does 

 the late Professor Brooks, of Johns Hopkins, say 

 that "living things do, in some way and in some 

 degree, control or condition inorganic nature; that 

 they hold their own by setting the mechanical prop- 

 erties of matter in opposition to each other, and that 

 this is their most notable and distinctive character- 

 istic." Does not Ray Lankester, the irate champion 

 of the mechanistic view of life, say essentially the 

 same thing when he calls man the great Insurgent 

 in Nature's camp — "crossing her courses, reversing 

 her processes, and defeating her ends ?" 



Life appears like the introduction of a new ele- 

 ment or force or tendency into the cosmos. Hence- 

 forth the elements go new ways, form new com- 

 pounds, build up new forms, and change the face of 



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