CHARLES B. WARRING, PH.D. 133 



arate existence. Physical Laws have done their work, 

 and this is all they have, or can have, to show for it. 



What better object lesson can there be to show their 

 utter inefficiency to produce a world like this, a world 

 clothed in vegetation, inhabited by living beings, and 

 adorned with the work of men's hands ! 



Some other force must have been at work. What is 

 it that has remedied the inefficiency of physical laws? 

 Some have sought an answer in the power some bodies 

 have of producing from an amorphous solution, or from a 

 melted mass, forms of symmetry and beauty. The power 

 of making crystals is indeed wonderful, but one can 

 scarce be serious in regarding crystalization as analogous 

 to the making of a tree or an animal. Heaping lumber 

 in solid cnbes, and bricks in parallelopipodons, or iron 

 in pyramids, however skillfully and beautifully done, 

 would do nothing towards building a house, and 

 yet this is all that crystalization can do. It piles up in 

 solid masses of regular geometrical shape, but does not 

 advance one step towards an organism. It leaves un- 

 touched the question which our surroundings force upon 

 us. What is the power which has supplemented physi- 

 cal laws ? In our search for an answer we turn first to 

 that with which we are most familiar, the works of man, 

 and then will carry our reasoning to the deeper problem 

 of organic being. 



Taking for illustration this building in which we have 

 met, all will agree that the unaided action of gravity 

 could not cause it to arise. Clay might have hardened 

 by the action of heat, but heat could not cause it to as- 

 sume the proper form and size, and so become bricks. 

 And if in some mysterious crystalization, and with 

 proper amount of heat, the clay became bricks, yet heat, 

 crystalization and gravity alone or together could not 

 have got them into the walls. The lime and sand by 

 some fortunate chain of accidents might have become 



