PART SECOND.

LECTURE I.

COMMON LIFE MATERIAL, APPARATUS, AND FUNCTIONS.

§ 1. Common Life Material.

MAX MÜLLER asserts that evolution is vulnerable at the two ends-at the beginning of the evolving life, and where it culminates in man. Darwin presupposed life to be already in operation, and undertook no more than to expound the law of its unfoldment into various forms. Yet Darwinism brings us to the very gates, and we are tempted to look through, both to discover the origin and the destiny. Sir William Thompson and Zollner have suggested the possible origin of life on our planet by transference of life-cells, in meteoric or cometic conditions, from some other globe. But this granted—and I believe substantially in fossil form it is true-yet it only shifts the problem, without solving it.

What is the origin of life is answerable in three ways: 1. It is the direct fiat of a supernatural Being. 2. It is the result of mechanical action in pre-existing atoms. an eternal potency of the universe.

3. It is

Those who advocate the mechanical theory urge that organic life is sustained by a mechanical interplay of atoms. What we call living is not a matter of willing, for the most part, but a complex affair that operates precisely as any clock or engine operates. Yet we never can escape the ne

cessity of being wound up. Besides, whatever may be true of our organic parts to-day, it is true that no one of them originally functioned without will. The heart, the lungs, the nutrition, that with us act automatically, with lower creatures are organs under conscious control. There is not an organ of any creature, from the bony plate of a tortoise to the eye of a vertebrate, that does not presuppose a desire, effort, and intent on the part of its possessor, or his ancestors. It is impossible to reduce life to a mechanical process, because there is one factor in all living processes that does not come under the head of mechanism—that is sentience.

We are driven to the conviction that either life originates from a God, or does not originate at all, but is a function of the universe. If we assume the former theory, then either life and substance were created from nothing; or preexisting matter, which originally and eternally was lifeless, was at a given moment endowed with life. The former supposition, if tenable at all, is so enormous that it leaves us utterly helpless in the way of logic; for, if something can come from nothing, our reasoning must end in nothing. If the latter supposition be assumed, it can only be sustained by a failure of the scientist to show that life is a potential quality of the universe. For, between the two, that life is an essential faculty of the universe, and that it is a special endowment of some elemental conditions of the universe, the former theory has this advantage: it really comes to a finality; whereas the latter theory only refers life back to a cause, but does not account for the cause-the origin of life is as obscure as ever. All we know by such a supposition is that life, as we see it, was caused by life as we do not see it.

We are forced tial and universal

toward the position that life is an essenquality of the universe-without origin and without end. That it has beginnings and ends in the way of local phenomena is true, and these are associated with

certain material conditions. Consider that our theology has educated us to think of the universe as a dead universe -a very impossible supposition. Originally, we are told, not anything was-only the great universal nothing. Then God created something, but it was a lifeless something. He, the Creator, only had life, and he was not what he had made. Death, or absence of life, therefore, was the primal fact-life the exception. Now, when you reverse this theory, and say life was the primal universal fact, you are for a moment disabled from thinking. The supposition is in accordance with all known facts; there is not one fact that militates against it in all our sciences, yet it is so simple a solution that we seem deprived of something. The mechanism of creation is what we miss; the familiarity of the method of referring every hard problem to a God, "with whom all things are possible," and "whose ways are past finding out."

Let us see that the only thing we need never assume is Nature. Can we explain what we see, and are conscious of, by referring it to what we do not see, and are not conscious of? Nature consists of a consecutive series of causes; do you gain anything by going back on this line of causes as far as you can, and then saying the farthest link is a Final Link, and that final link is a Final Cause, and does not need to be accounted for? It caused itself; it linked itself. Of all absurdities the strangest is that which imagines it finds any explanation of an infinite series, which series excludes from each term self-causation, by supposing a selfcaused Cause as the Origin. You have now to account for the self-caused Cause. Why not stop at life as uncaused, instead of assuming an uncaused cause of life? The evolutionist says life is—it is an ultimate essential fact. The creationist answers life is not an ultimate fact; it was caused, but its cause is an ultimate fact.

The choice is open to us, and we must adopt the view that gives satisfaction to the demands of reason. I shall

not hesitate to accept of the evolution of eternal life as the more rational hypothesis. Why did this universal potency of the universe manifest itself as an active organic potency in a series of phenomena on our globe? Undoubtedly this depended on the presence of those material conditions which enable life to be manifested. The conditions, for our globe at least, are the presence of what we call protoplasm or lifestuff. That these are the conditions everywhere in the universe, for any and all life conditions, is not to be assumed; nor is it at all probable. But on our globe we know life is apparent only in protoplasmic forms. We have no analytic power, microscopic or otherwise, to enable us absolutely to say that some manifestation of life may not be without beginning even here, but we can only trace life back to what seems to be a beginning in a protoplasmic cell; although the rhizopods are in some sense precellular.

What Nature could have done with protoplasm in six days I will not undertake to say, but she certainly did not make man within six days; nor even a sponge. The foundation was carefully laid, however, and in due time— that is, after one or two or more hundreds of millions of years-the cell was a man. Nor was there any change of material all the way. In brain, and muscle, and marrow, man is made of the same stuff as the oyster that he eats and the corn that he hoes. Life-stuff in the brain-cells, in a princely way, makes a study of life-stuff in a mosquito or a nettle.

The amoeba is one of the simplest creatures endowed with life. It is called amoeba, which is the Latin for changeable, because it never appears twice in quite the same form. In higher creatures the wonder is to see so many special organs for special purposes, but the wonder here is that there are no organs at all; and yet the amœba gets on very well, eating, walking, and voiding waste. It extemporizes organs as it needs them; and that part of its body which just now is legs, in a moment will be stomach; but

it never has use for a head. Now it seems to be a line, but immediately it is a small stomach digesting a dinner. Here is protoplasm at its simplest. It is as much like the white of an egg as anything, which is only protoplasm in one modification. It is semi-fluid, and chemically composed of oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, and carbon; that is, of the same elements that make up air, water, and wood. So we have not one new element in life-stuff. It is altogether familiar material, only that, in right chemical proportions, it has the power of serving as the basis of life. It is not life, nor living, but it can live. In microscopic creatures it is active, having power to move, to feel, to eat, to multiply itself. But so exceedingly are these creatures like no life, that they are as likely to pass one way as another; that is, to press forward in activity, or lapse into the inanimate. These first efforts at life constitute a free belt, and life-stuff plays back and forth across a line-into life, and into nonliving conditions, with great ease.

If you carefully observe one of these specks of protoplasm, you will now see it touched by another speck, like itself, or a little higher organized; and forthwith one folds about the other, and devours it. The swallowed particle is duly digested, and becomes a component part of its eater. This is the beginning of growth. It is protoplasm eating protoplasm. It has no mouth just now, only legs; but it will quickly become all mouth as it chooses. The wonderful organs that we possess are potentially there, and Nature in due time will pick them out, and specialize them; and then legs will stay legs, and stomachs will be nothing but stomachs.

That, in reality, is all the difference there is in living creatures-one is more or less thoroughly organized than another. The tissues of a horse, or a tree, or a man, are all of the same material as the amoeba, only more or less elaborated and specialized. Even the fibers of our nerves are renewed and grow from the contents of added cells of