173 
THE CONTRAST BETWEEN CRYSTALLIZATION 
AND LIFE . By John Eliot Howard, Esq., F.L.S., 
F.R.M.S., F.R.H.S., Memb. Pharm. Soc. and Botanical 
Soc. of France, &c, 
I T is well known that powerful and persevering efforts have 
recently been made to confound the distinction between 
animate and inanimate matter ; to represent life as merely a 
special form of chemical or mechanical action, and organization 
as the result of some undiscovered correlative of the molecular 
forces of nature. It has been supposed that the notion of 
Deity, or of an omnipotent creative and sustaining power, may 
be thus removed to a greater distance from the human mind; 
and the unwelcome thought of responsibility to a higher tri- 
bunal than those of earth, and of subjection to an eternal judg- 
ment, abolished. That so little success has as yet attended the 
prophets and teachers of this new doctrine, is not owing to any 
lack of earthly distinction attaching to the eminent names of 
its propagators, nor to any want of appreciation of their own 
merits and those of their fellow-labourers. It might almost be 
said that they form a mutually supporting and a somewhat ex- 
clusive sect.* But they have before them an impossible task, for 
though they possess abundance of intellectual resource, and could 
therefore hope to “ make the worse appear the better reason,” 
yet they have to overcome the impracticably practical character 
of the average English mind, and its strong common sense, to 
say nothing of its attachment to its cherished traditional 
opinions. It is not the present generation of Englishmen who 
will believe that life was brought down to this planet by some 
fragmentary disrupted portions of a ruined world ; neither will 
they be reconciled to the thought that they are really in their 
origin “ viler than the seaweed,” and in their gradual fashioning 
improved out of the most lowly organized animals f that the 
earth and the sea support. 
Works of Preceding Authors. 
2. As I mean to follow out my ow ; n line of thought and 
* See Appendix ( Edinburgh Review). 
f The amoebas and moners. See Appendix (C). 
