12 EVOLUTION OF LIFE. 
Force are brought about, will be worked out exactly as the 
laws of other Forces have been. And as the difficulties ex- 
perienced in the study of the so-called vital phenomena are 
due to their complexity as compared with the simplicity of 
the so-called physical ones, it is quite natural that the organic 
sciences should be less advanced than the inorganic. 
These terms, however, Organic and Inorganic, Vital and 
Physical, Animate and Inanimate, Living and Dead, are 
very unphilosophical, since their use implies an entirely 
false view of Nature. The classification of objects into 
Animal, Vegetal, and Mineral, is a good arrangement for 
study; but it is a purely artificial one, no such distinction 
existing in Nature. The usual tests for distinguishing 
animals from plants, plants from minerals, have been ren- 
dered perfectly worthless by the discoveries of late years. 
Living beings like the Monera, representatives of a king- 
dom intermediate between the animal and the vegetal, are 
so structureless, so absolutely homogeneous, that crystals 
are complex bodies as compared with them. Products like 
sugar and alcohol, supposed at one time to be purely or- 
ganic in their origin, to be produced only by the so-called ! 
Vital Force, are now made in laboratories by the combina- 
tion of their inorganic elements. There are no substances 
in the Organic world whose elements are not resolvable into 
those of the Inorganic, no Vital Forces which are not convert- 
ible into Physical ones. In a word, no one can show where 
the Inorganic world ends and the Organic begins, the transi- 
tion being so gradual. The objection is therefore ground- 
less that the study of life is entirely different from that of 
all other phenomena, and that one can learn little about it. 
On the contrary, we have every reason to expect that in 
time we shall have a Science of Life, or Biology, a Science 
which will bear the same relation to Zoology and Botany 
that History does to mere Chronicle; that will tell us not 
only what plants and animals live and have lived, but why 
