elves as
accurately as those of rotifers or planarians.

And of course, on the very surface of the matter, the question
presents itself to the biologist why it should not be so. The
irrefragable philosophy of modern biology is that the most complex
forms of living creatures have derived their splendid complexity and
adaptations from the slow and majestically progressive variation and
survival from the simpler and the simplest forms. If, then, the
simplest forms of the present and the past were not governed by
accurate and unchanging laws of life, how did the rigid certainties
that manifestly and admittedly govern the more complex and the most
complex come into play?

If our modern philosophy of biology be, as we know it is, true, then
it must be very strong evidence indeed that would lead us to conclude
that the laws seen to be universal break down and cease accurately to
operate where the objects become microscopic, and our knowledge of
them is by no means full, exhaustive, and clear.

Moreover, looked at in the abstract, it is a little difficult to
conceive why there should be more uncertainty about the life processes
of a group of lowly living things than there should be about the
behavior, in reaction, of a given group of molecules.

The triumph of modern knowledge is the certainty, which nothing can
shake, that nature's laws are immutable. The stability of her
processes, the precision of her action, and the universality of her
laws, is the basis of all science, to which biology forms no
exception. Once establish, by clear and unmistakable demonstration,
the life history of an organism, and truly some change must have come
over nature as a whole, if that life history be not the same to-morrow
as to-day; and the same to one observer, in the same conditions, as to
another.

No amount of paradox would induce us to believe that the combining
proportions of hydrogen and oxygen had altered, in a specified
experimenter's hands, in synthetically producing water.

We believe that the melting point of platinum and the freezing point
of mercury are the same as they were a hundred years ago, and as they
will be a hundred years hence.

Now, carefully remember that so far as we can see at all, it must be
so with life. Life inheres in protoplasm; but just as you cannot get
_abstract matter_--that is, matter with no properties or modes of
motion--so you cannot get _abstract_ protoplasm. Every piece of living
protoplasm we