THE BREATH OF LIFE 



meration that we describe a watch, or a steam- 

 engine, or any other piece of machinery. Describe 

 I say, but such description does not account for the 

 watch or tell us its full significance. To do this, we 

 must include the watchmaker, and the world of 

 mind and ideas amid which he lives. Now, in a liv- 

 ing machine, the machine and the maker are one. 

 The watch is perpetually self-wound and self-regu- 

 lated and self -repaired. It is made up of millions of 

 other little watches, the cells, all working together 

 for one common end and ticking out the seconds 

 and minutes of life with unfailing regularity. Un- 

 like the watch we carry in our pockets, if we take 

 it apart so as to stop its ticking, it can never be put 

 together again. It has not merely stopped ; it is dead. 

 The late William Keith Brooks, of Johns Hopkins 

 University, said in opposition to Huxley that he 

 held to the "old-fashioned conviction that living 

 things do in some way, and in some degree, con- 

 trol or condition inorganic nature; that they hold 

 their own by setting the mechanical properties of 

 matter in opposition to each other, and that this is 

 their most notable and distinctive characteristic." 

 And yet, he said, to think of the living world as 

 "anything but natural" is impossible. 



VIII 



Life seems to beget a new kind of chemistry, the 

 same elements behave so differently when they are 



236 



