A POSSIBLE ORIGIN OF ORGANIC LIFE. 
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ages since, whose climax is perhaps not yet reached, but 
whose material expression we recognise as the organic 
kingdom of Nature? 
The epoch which gave it birth has long since passed 
away. No such conditions, nor anything like them, now 
exist within our cognizance. The change from inorganic to 
organic is therefore to us impossible. But we still find that 
the germs of life, those minutest organisms which have 
perhaps continued to reproduce their race with but slow and 
slight changes from those far distant periods, are capable of 
.existing under what seem to us now very extraordinary 
conditions. They may lie dormant for long periods, perhaps 
for centuries resisting time and frost and drought. No heat 
short of the boiling point will injure them. We do not know 
what temperature would be required to kill them all, and we 
may well understand that if indeed their ancestors were born 
among the fires of this seething globe, when there was neither 
earth nor water, no heat which we can now apply would have 
affected them. It is indeed doubted whether protoplasm 
can in any case endure a degree of heat beyond the boiling 
point if once the hard cellulose of its protecting wall be 
penetrated. And it is an accepted doctrine that the cellulose 
cannot come into existence except as a secretion from pre¬ 
existing protoplasm, but we do not know that the heat which 
protoplasm will endure has always been limited to 212° 
Falir. Its power of endurance seems greatly varied now. 
Many creatures are killed by heat of much less intensity than 
212°. This limit may be a comparatively recent adaptation, 
the original protoplasmic germs having been adapted to 
absorb water not in its liquid, but in its gaseous form. 
The progress of science reveals to us more closely at every 
step the continuity of the universe. The more we inter¬ 
rogate Nature the more loudly she answers that there are no 
gaps, no breaks, no miracles ; that nothing is created ; that 
everything grows ; and that growth is the unfolding of hidden 
potentialities, the swelling of the waves of force which rise 
and fall and rise again in new combinations, each growing 
out of what went before ; that organic life is only crystalline 
life under a new and more concentrated aspect, giving rise 
to more complex phenomena ; that human life is the same 
in kind but on a higher level of concentration and complexify 
with self-consciousness as one of its special and most remark¬ 
able phenomena ; that there are no doubt higher levels still 
to which concentrated force may attain, and that the self- 
conscious units may very possibly rise to the next plaice by 
some increase of concentration, without losing that special 
attribute of conscious personality. 
