5 
now we seek to express in one word the grand distinctive feature 
which this term implies, life may be described as the condition 
which can feel; not indeed the condition which does feel, for there 
are many functions of life which involve no feeling or conscious- 
ness; but these are exhibitions of mechanical or automatic force, 
originated in consciousness, which, when its work is done and its 
machinery is in working order, has the happy characteristic of 
passing on to other scenes where new necessities call for it. 
The laws which have carried this life through ages of time, 
and also clothed it in so many wondrous forms, are also laws of 
our own life. What life has done in the past can be done again, if 
it be worth doing; so that we find utility as well as pleasure in con- 
templating its history. Here, as elsewhere, this exposition should 
be an educator, for 
The department of Organic Material 
will display the handiwork of life in the dwellings and machinery 
it has built for itself from the beginning of geological time. 
As we approach non-living matter, or the inorganic world, we 
are led to speculate on the origin of life. This raw material, as we 
can call it, represented here by 
The department of Inorganic Material, 
‘is the product of a laboratory whose processes are coextensive 
with time, and whose boundaries are those of the universe, 
In its history we find. material for ceaseless wonder, for per- 
petual admiration, and also for ‘serious thought. Our minds 
necessarily become earnest in the presence of the vastness of the 
stellar masses, and we feel something akin to horror in observing 
the stupendous effects of force. We are compelled to pause and 
ask ourselves the meaning of the tremendous conflict of the forces 
which raged for zons before the earth was fit for life. We see 
processes of world-making, with their successive storms of matter, 
substance after substance: descending to their centres, either in 
gentle. mists or in thundering avalanches, as the case might be, 
with the dissipation of heat or decrease of temperature. We see 
the atmospheres of planets gradually cleared, so as to admit the 
light of the great solar bodies, and the worlds become habitable. 
But why or how the fire of life caught the material of life as it 
exists here, we cannot yet perceive. It did come, whether by 
communication from an outside source, or whether actually pro- 
