322 Life and Immortality. 
animal existences. Low down in the scale of life are forms 
about which it cannot be predicated these are plants and these 
are animals. Scientists are unable to say where plant-life 
ends and animal-life begins. No hard-and-fast line can be 
drawn beween the two vast kingdoms of life, and it is often 
wholly impossible to decide whether we are dealing with an 
animal ora plant. There can be no question that the earli- 
est life was vegetable by nature, and that its habitat was the 
primeval ocean. This is no less the teaching of science than 
that of the Scriptures. From some such life, originating 
de novo as the Spirit of God passed over the waters, the two 
great branches of animate nature may have taken their rise. 
What the form of this life may have been, whether cellular 
or a mere mass of formless protoplasm, the mind of man 
cannot asseverate. It is a mystery, and will doubtless ever 
remain as such to finite intelligence. That this life, no mat- 
ter how apparently insignificant it must have been, breathed 
in its own simple fashion, that is, by the coetaneous opera- 
tion of the ruach chayim and the neshemet chayim upon its 
simple substance in accordance with natural law, there can 
be no dispute. Breathing is not always conditioned by the 
existence of nostrils. Plants respire, or, in other words, 
take in carbonic acid from the air through their stomata, or 
mouths, which they separate into its components of carbon 
and oxygen, appropriating the former, which they build into 
solid matter, but usually throwing off the latter into the 
great receptacle of atmosphere from which it was extracted. 
Even a moner, which has no distinction of parts, may be 
said to breathe, but it breathes by means of its whole exter- 
nal surface, for xeshemeh and ruach are as necessary to it as 
to man himself. It will thus be obvious that plants are liv- 
ing, breathing frames, or bodies of life, and hence are as 
much entitled to be considered as living souls as animals 
are. Let but God withdraw his rach, or spirit, from them, 
and they die and to their dust return. Surely no more could 
be predicated of animals. 
