Page:Evolution of Life (Henry Cadwalader Chapman, 1873).djvu/14

Force are brought about, will be worked out exactly as the laws of other Forces have been. And as the difficulties experienced in the study of the so-called vital phenomena are due to their complexity as compared with the simplicity of the so-called physical ones, it is quite natural that the organic sciences should be less advanced than the inorganic. These terms, however, Organic and Inorganic, Vital and Physical, Animate and Inanimate, Living and Dead, are very unphilosophical, since their use implies an entirely false view of Nature, The classification of objects into Animal, Vegetal, and Mineral, is a good arrangement for study; but it is a purely artificial one, no such distinction existing in Nature. The usual tests for distinguishing animals from plants, plants from minerals, have been rendered perfectly worthless by the discoveries of late years. Living beings like the Monera, representatives of a kingdom intermediate between the animal and the vegetal, are so structureless, so absolutely homogeneous, that crystals are complex bodies as compared with them. Products like sugar and alcohol, supposed at one time to be purely organic in their origin, to be produced only by the so-called Vital Force, are now made in laboratories by the combination of their inorganic elements. There are no substances in the Organic world whose elements are not resolvable into those of the Inorganic, no Vital Forces which are not convertible into Physical ones. In a word, no one can show where the Inorganic world ends and the Organic begins, the transition being so gradual. The objection is therefore groundless that the study of life is entirely different from that of all other phenomena, and that one can learn little about it. On the contrary, we have every reason to expect that in time we shall have a Science of Life, or Biology, a Science which will bear the same relation to Zoology and Botany that History does to mere Chronicle; that will tell us not only what plants and animals live and have lived, but why