he past, as well as our own experience within the
historic period, confirm the view already arrived at on other grounds
that _Creation is a completed work and is not now going on_; and the
universal testimony from organic nature is that degeneration and decay
have marked the history of every living form. Just as the individual
grows old and dies, so do species degenerate and become extinct.

III

LIFE ONLY FROM LIFE

"No biological generalization rests on a wider series of observations,
or has been subjected to a more critical scrutiny, than that every
living organism has come into existence from a living portion or
portions of a pre-existing organism."[3]

"Was there anything so absurd as to believe that a number of atoms, by
falling together of their own accord, could make a sprig of moss, a
microbe, a living animal? ... It is utterly absurd.... Here scientific
thought is compelled to accept the idea of creative power. Forty years
ago I asked Liebig ... if he believed that the grass and flowers, which
we saw around us, grew by mere mechanical force. He answered, 'No more
than I could believe that a book of botany describing them could grow by
mere chemical force.'"[4]

"Let them not imagine that any hocus-pocus of electricity or viscous
fluids would make a living cell.... Nothing approaching to a cell of
living creature has ever yet been made.... No artificial process
whatever could make living matter out of dead."[5]

[Footnote 3: P.C. Mitchell, in Encyclopaedia Britannica, Vol. III, p.
952.]

[Footnote 4: Lord Kelvin in the London _Times_, May 4, 1903.]

[Footnote 5: Lord Kelvin, to a class of Medical Students, October 28,
1904.]

I

Ever since Rene Descartes, in his Holland laboratory, dissected the
heads of great numbers of animals in order to discover the processes of
imagination and memory, men have been seeking a physical or
materialistic answer to such questions as, What is life? What is it to
be alive? How shall we distinguish the living from the not-living?

No one of to-day, in the light of the correlation of vital processes
with the general law of the conservation of energy, believes that life
in plants and animals is a separate entity which may exist outside of
and apart from matter. In a scientific sense, we only know life by its
association with living matter, which in its simplest form is known as
_protoplasm_. The latter has been termed the physical basis of life, and
so far as we