Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: LIFE ONLY FEOM LIFE O 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 preexisting organism."' " 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.' "a " 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." ' 1 P. C. Mitchell, in Encyclopedia Britannica, Vol. Ill, p. 952. 2 Lord Kelvin in the London Times, May 4, 1903. v. Ever since Kene 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 -v, 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 b...