The Breath of Life

er elements just happened to come together at the right time in the right proportions and under the right conditions, and life was the result. It was an accident in the therma

tivities, mental and physical alike, are only automatic responses to the play of the blind, material forces of external nature. All forms of life, with all their wonderful adaptations, are only the chance happenings of the blind gropings and clashin

because, in his laboratory experiments, he has been able to dispense with the male principle, and to fertilize the eggs of certain low forms of marine life by chemical compounds alone. "The problem of the beginning and end of individual life is physico-chemically clear"-much clearer than the first beginnings of life. All individual life begins with the egg, but where did we get the egg? When chemical synthesis w

m could only give him the mother-principle also! But it will not. The mother-principle is at the v

rip of that order, where do moral obligations come in? A gun, a steam-engine, knows no ethics, and to the extent that we are compelled to do things, are we in the same category. Freedom of choice alone gives any validity to ethical consideration. I dissent from the idea to which he apparently holds, that biology is only applied physics and chemistry. Is not geology also applied physics and chemistry? Is it any more or any less? Yet what a world of difference between the two-between a rock an

ng its processes capable of physico-chemical analysis, he hastens to the conclusion that i

he rocks, the hills, the streams are in their place, but any other place would do as well. But in the organic world we strike another order-an order where the relation and subordination of pa

nother, it experiments endlessly like an inventor, but always improves on its last attempts. Chance would have kept things at a standstill; the principle of chance, give it time enough, must end where it