566 THE PLANT'S PLACE IN NATURE 



tions it again becomes active. We should remember, how- 

 ever, that even granting in such cases the appearance of hfe 

 in a body which before was lifeless, it was a reappearance; 

 and this previous life again confronts us with the original 

 problem. We still must ask. Is there not some profound 

 difference between a bodj^ in which life reappears and one 

 in which life never has appeared? 



To this question the doubter may reply: "Let us go back 

 then to the first of living things. Evolutionists suppose this 

 to have come from something that had never been alive 

 before. Does not the change here assumed imply that the 

 inorganic realm merges so gradually into the organic that 

 some organisms differ no more from some minerals than one 

 organism or one mineral does from another?" Not at all. 

 It does not follow just because one thing is transformed into 

 another tliat the new may not be profoundly different from 

 the old. An evolutionist, therefore, is free to believe that 

 when the first living creature appeared upon the earth, a 

 form of existence essentially different from any that had 

 been here before, came into the world. We may suppose 

 that as the earth was cooling from its molten state there 

 were formed according to chemical and physical laws acting 

 under conditions not since repeated, aggregations of com- 

 pounds like those now found onlj^ in the organic realm; and 

 that as soon as the temperature became favorable these 

 aggregations became alive, exhibiting the activities of a 

 living thing mucli as a revived creature would do. In saying 

 this, however, we have admitted only that life may have 

 appeared as soon as the conditions required for its manifes- 

 tation were present. We liave not implied that life is a 

 product of the chemical and physical properties of matter, 

 however necessary certain material conditions are to the 

 manifestation of life in an organism. It may l)e freely ad- 

 mitted that chemically and physically considered certain 

 lifeless bodies are indistinguishable from certain living ones; 

 that indeed one and the same liody may pass from one condi- 

 tion to the other without change of properties, and that 

 when alive all the activities of its ]iarts are describable in 

 cJKMnical and physical terms. All this would necessarily 



