sm, or a result of any
particular arrangement of protoplasmic particles or molecules, is not
less easily or unanswerably demonstrable. For if it were, as long as the
particular molecular arrangement remained unaltered, life would
necessarily be in attendance; an amputated joint would, until
decomposition set in, be as much alive as the trunk from which it had
been lopped, even as water poured from a jug into a glass is quite as
much liquid as the water remaining in the jug. There would be no such
thing as dead meat, which was not putrid as well as dead, any more than
water can freeze without changing from a fluid to a solid; and there
would moreover be production antecedent in origin to its own producer.
The force of the last at least of these objections is not to be
resisted. Water, ammonia, and carbonic acid cannot, it is admitted,
combine to form protoplasm, unless a principle of life preside over the
operation. Unless under those auspices the combination never takes
place. At present, whenever assuming its presidential functions, the
principle of life seems to be invariably embodied in a portion of
pre-existing protoplasm; but there certainly was a time when the fact
was otherwise. Time was, as geology places beyond all doubt, when our
globe and its appurtenances consisted wholly of inorganic matter, and
possessed not one single animal or vegetable inhabitant. In order, then,
that any protoplasm or the substance of any organism should have been
brought into existence in the first instance, life plainly must have
been already existent. It must at one time have been possible for life,
without being previously embodied, to mould and vivify inert matter;
and it must needs have been by unembodied life that inorganic matter was
first organised and animated. There is no possible alternative to this
conclusion, except that of supposing that death may have given birth to
life--that absolutely lifeless and inert matter may have spontaneously
exerted itself with all the marvellous energy requisite for its
conversion into living matter, exerting for the purpose powers which,
under the conditions of the case, it could not have acquired without
exercising before it acquired them. Whoever declines to swallow such
absurdity has no choice but to admit that unembodied life must have been
the original manufacturer of protoplasm: but to admit this, and yet to
suppose that when now-a-days embodied life is observed to give birth to
new em