nds so gray and apparently
lifeless, subject it to a magnetic current lifeless, what happens? The
iron block is composed of molecules which under ordinary conditions are
disposed in all possible directions indifferently. But when the current
passes through there is tremendous movement in that apparently inert
mass. All of the tiny particles of which it is composed turn and shift
until their north poles all point more or less approximately in the
direction of the magnetic force.

"When that happens the block itself becomes a magnet, filled with and
surrounded by a field of magnetic energy; instinct with it. Outwardly it
has not moved; actually there has been prodigious motion."

"But it is not conscious motion," I objected.

"Ah, but how do you know?" he asked. "If Jacques Loeb* is right, that
action of the iron molecules is every bit as conscious a movement as
the least and the greatest of our own. There is absolutely no difference
between them.

"Your and my and its every movement is nothing but an involuntary and
inevitable reaction to a certain stimulus. If he's right, then I'm a
buttercup--but that's neither here nor there. Loeb--all he did was
to restate destiny, one of humanity's oldest ideas, in the terms of
tropisms, infusoria and light. Omar Khayyam chemically reincarnated in
the Rockefeller Institute. Nevertheless those who accept his theories
have to admit that there is essentially no difference between their
impulses and the rush of filings toward a magnet.

"Equally nevertheless, Goodwin, the iron does meet Haeckel's three
tests--it can receive a stimulus, it does react to that stimulus and it
retains memory of it; for even after the current has ceased it remains
changed in tensile strength, conductivity and other qualities that were
modified by the passage of that current; and as time passes this memory
fades. Precisely as some human experience increases wariness, caution,
which keying up of qualities remains with us after the experience
has passed, and fades away in the ratio of our sensitivity plus
retentiveness divided by the time elapsing from the original
experience--exactly as it is in the iron."

* Professor Jacques Loeb, of the Rockefeller Institute, New
York, "The Mechanistic Conception of Life."

CHAPTER XVI. CONSCIOUS METAL!

"Granted," I acquiesced. "We now come to their means of locomotion. In
its simplest terms all locomotion is progress through space against
the for