Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 1.djvu/328

316 building them up, from the simpler to the more complex, and do not doubt that they will eventually produce the most complex. Moreover, the phenomena attending isomeric change give a clew to those movements which are the only indications we have of life in its lowest forms. In various colloidal substances, including the albuminoid, isomeric change is accompanied by contraction or expansion, and consequent motion; and, in such primordial types as the Protogenes of Haeckel, which do not differ in appearance from minute portions of albumen, the observed motions are comprehensible as accompanying isomeric changes caused by variations in surrounding physical actions. The probability of this interpretation will be seen on remembering the evidence we have that, in the higher organisms, the functions are essentially effected by isomeric changes from one to another of the multitudinous forms which protein assumes. Thus the reply to this objection is, first, that there is going on from both sides a rapid narrowing of the chasm supposed to be impassable; and, second, that, even were the chasm not in course of being filled up, we should no more be justified in therefore assuming a supernatural commencement of life than Kepler was justified in assuming that there were guiding-spirits to keep the planets in their orbits, because he did not see how else they were to be kept in their orbits.

The third definite objection made by Mr. Martineau is of kindred nature. The Hypothesis of Evolution is, he thinks, met by the insurmountable difficulty that plant-life and animal life are absolutely distinct. He says:

This is an extremely unfortunate objection to raise. For, though there are no transitions from vegetal to animal at the places Mr. Martineau names, where, indeed, no biologist would dream of looking for them, yet the connection between the two great kingdoms of living things is so complete that separation is now regarded as impossible. For a long time naturalists endeavored to frame definitions such as would, the one include all plants and exclude all animals, and the other include all animals and exclude all plants. But they have been so repeatedly foiled in the attempt that they have given it up. There is no chemical distinction that holds; there is no structural distinction that holds; there is no functional distinction that holds; there is no distinction as to mode of existence that holds. Large groups of the simpler animals contain chlorophyll, and decompose carbonic acid under the influence of light as plants do. Large groups of the simpler plants, as you may observe from the diatoms from any stagnant pool,