722 SUMMARY OF CUREENT RESEARCHES RELATING TO 



biologists answer without hesitancy, ' No, we have no facts to justify 

 such a conclusion.' Professor Huxley shall represent them. He 

 says: 'The properties of living matter distinguish it absolutely 

 from all other kinds of things ; ' and, he continues, ' the present state 

 of our knowledge furnishes us with no link between the living and 

 the not-living.' Now let us carefully remember that the great doc- 

 trine of Charles Darwin has furnished biology with a magnificent 

 generalization — one, indeed, which stands upon so broad a basis that 

 great masses of detail and many needful interlocking facts are of 

 necessity relegated to the quiet workers of the present and the earnest 

 labourers of the years to come. But it is a doctrine which cannot be 

 shaken. The constant and universal action of variation, the struggle 

 for existence, and the ' survival of the fittest,' few who are competent 

 to grasp will have the temerity to doubt. And to many, that which 

 lies within it as a doctrine and forms the fibre of its fabric, is the 

 existence of a continuity, an unbroken stream of unity running from 

 the base to the apex of the entire organic series. The plant and the 

 animal, the lowliest organized and the most complex, the minutest 

 and the largest, are related to each other so as to constitute one 

 majestic organic whole. Now, to this splendid continuity practical • 

 biology presents no adverse fact. All our most recent and most 

 accurate knowledge confirms it. 



But the question is — Does this continuity terminate now in the 

 living series, and is there then a break — a sharp, clear discontinuity, 

 and beyond, another realm immeasurably less endowed, known as the 

 realm of Not-life ? Or, does what has been taken for the clear-cut 

 boundary of the vital area, when more deeply searched, reveal the 

 presence of a force at present unknown, which changes not-living into 

 the living, and thus makes all nature an unbroken sequence and a 

 continuous whole ? That this is a great question, a question involv- 

 ing large issues, will be seen by all who have familiarized themselves 

 with the thought and fact of our times. But we must treat it purely 

 as a question of science ; it is not a question of how life first appeared 

 upon the earth, it is only a question of whether there is any natural 

 force now at work building not-living matter into living forms. Nor 

 have we to determine whether or not, in the indefinite past, the not- 

 vital elements on the earth, at some point of their highest activity, 

 were endowed with or became possessed of the properties of life. On 

 that subject there is no doubt. The elements that compose proto- 

 plasm — the physical basis of all living things — are the familiar 

 elements of the world withoxit life. The mystery of life is not in the 

 elements that compose the vital stuff. We know them all ; we know 

 their properties. The mystery consists solely in how these elements 

 can be so combined as to acquire the transcendent properties of life. 

 Moreover, to the investigator it is not a question of by what means 

 matter dead — without the shimmer of a vital quality — became either 

 slowly or suddenly possessed of the properties of life. Enough 

 for us to know that whatever the power that wrought the change, 

 that power was competent, as the issue proves. But that which 

 calm and patient research has to determine is, whether matter 



