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true, as yet failed to discover any case in which even the 
lowest organism appears to have been generated out of 
inorganic matter. Let it, however, be assumed that such a 
sequence of phenomena, — no more, remember, than a sequence 
of phenomena, — may be at last recognised as sometimes 
occurring, or as having at some time occurred in the course of 
nature, — there will still remain at this upward step a huge 
difficulty for the Materialist. Beginning, as he must, with 
separate atoms endued with motion, and this motion resulting 
in attractions, repulsions, and mutual affinities, he has with 
these, when we arrive at animated nature, to build up an 
organic whole. Now, an organic whole is not the mere sum 
total of the constituent atoms. These, as we all know, are in 
perpetual flux in every living creature. ^^The parallel,^^ says 
Huxley, between a whirlpool in a stream and a living being, 
which has been often drawn, is as just as it is striking. The 
whirlpool is permanent, but the particles of water which 
constitute it are incessantly changing. Those which enter it 
on the one side are whirled around, and temporarily constitute 
a part of its individuality ; and as they leave on the other side 
their places are made good by new comers."’"’ * The turmoil 
of molecules in a living creature may, he thinks, be justly 
likened to the great wave of the vortex below Niagara, which 
for centuries past has maintained the same general form, 
though the component particles of water are changing every 
moment {The Crayfish, p. 84). One might almost think 
that Samuel Taylor Coleridge was speaking, and with 
Coleridge I continue : — As the column of blue smoke from 
a cottage chimney in the breathless summer noon, or the 
steadfast-seeming cloud on the edge point of a hill in the 
driving air-current, which, momently condensed and re- 
composed, is the common phantom of a thousand successors, 
— such is the flesh which our bodily eyes transmit to us, which 
our hands touch. Not only,’^ he proceeds, the characteristic 
shape is evolved from the invisible central power, but the 
material mass itself is acquired by assimilation. The germinal 
power of the plant transmutes the fixed air and the elementary 
base of water into grass or leaves, and on these the organific 
principle in the ox or the elephant exercises an alchemy still 
more stupendous. As the unseen agency weaves its magic 
eddies, the foliage becomes indifferently the bone and its 
marrow, the pulpy brain or the solid ivory. That what you 
see is blood, is flesh, is itself the work, or, shall I say, the 
* Huxley, The Ch'ayfish. Kegan Paul & Co., London, 1880. 
