592 KANSAS CITY REVIEW OF SCIENCE. 
with a force and function that had no knowable origin or cause. Why not find 
it here in this condition of matter so ethereal in its refinement as to baffle the mind 
in its effort to realize it, but having a force to which nothing ponderable can be 
compared? Or, if even this, as we have tested it, is too crude to respond to 
the uses of the complex and wondrous thing we call life, why not follow it still 
farther to a yet more exalted state, through which the divine essence may quicken 
the forms of matter by which we recognize the phenomena of life? Is this 
hypothesis any more strained from the point of to-day than was that of Faraday 
from that of sixty-five years ago, with the testimony of both spectroscope and 
microscope added? Or must we, like the worshippers of the fossil god and the 
hydrogen god, set up this radiant molecular image and worship it, until some 
daring investigator with new appliances breaks the image and advances us another 
step in physical facts. 
Our lame methods of illustration at best give but an unsatisfactory idea of 
the immense force and activity of this matter in the radiant state, but Flammarion’s 
words may help in a degree to its realization. Speaking of Crookes’ experiments 
before the French Academy, this eminent authority says: ‘‘ The ball which Mr. 
Crookes uses, of four inches diameter, when exhausted to one-millionth of an 
atmosphere, still contains a quintillion of molecules, and its capacity a septillion. 
Now, pierce this globe with the aid of an electric spark, which traverses it 
through an opening entirely microscopic, nevertheless sufficient to permit air 
to enter it. If in this opening the molecules enter at the rate of a hundred 
millions per second, it would require more than four hundred millions of years to 
fill the ball, yet it is actually filled in an hour through the microscopic opening.” 
The mind cannot grasp such numbers, nor is it flexible enough to sense such 
infinitely small particles. But it enables it in some degree to imagine the force, 
activity and power of matter in its ultimate forms, and to satisfy the mind that 
life, through the still larger comparative masses of protoplasm, as quickened by 
this inconceivable energy, is possible. 
Here, then, we find the basis for a new hypothesis as to life, not as to the 
origin of life; for that lies still behind, but as to the union between life and- 
organic development, for here all seeming necessary conditions meet, and we 
can conceive how such tremendous and exalted forces, operating through this 
plastic material, may create the environment for the production of living phe- 
nomena. It seems indeed as if here must end the inquiry into the phenomena of 
life in this direction, as it is difficult to imagine how a farther refinement of 
matter by physical methods is possible, or how it could aid what appears so clear 
—that life as we see it must thus find its expression through organic forms. We 
have followed it with sure footsteps to this border land, and we know it cannot 
come in any other way. So far the hard demand for facts has been met. This 
much seems to have been necessary for physical science to do, for without it 
superstition, dogma, or credulity had no limit; the infinite was simply chaos, 
stirred by any vagrant force that, surrounded by its own agitation, called itself 
