Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 15.djvu/766

 been assigned the duty of building up structure and of transforming the energy of lifeless matter into that of living.

To suppose, however, that all protoplasm is identical where no difference cognizable by any means at our disposal can be detected would be an error. Of two particles of protoplasm, between which we may defy all the power of the microscope, all the resources of the laboratory, to detect a difference, one can develop only to a jelly-fish, the other only to a man, and one conclusion alone is here possible—that deep within them there must be a fundamental difference which thus determines their inevitable destiny, but of which we know nothing, and can assert nothing beyond the statement that it must depend on their hidden molecular constitution.

In the molecular condition of protoplasm there is probably as much complexity as in the disposition of organs in the most highly differentiated organisms; and between two masses of protoplasm indistinguishable from one another there may be as much molecular difference as there is between the form and arrangement of organs in the most widely separated animals or plants.

Herein lies the many-sidedness of protoplasm; herein lies its significance as the basis of all morphological expression, as the agent of all physiological work, while in all this there must be an adaptiveness to purpose as great as any claimed for the most complicated organism.

From the facts which have been now brought to your notice there is but one legitimate conclusion—that life is a property of protoplasm. In this assertion there is nothing that need startle us. The essential phenomena of living beings are not so widely separated from the phenomena of lifeless matter as to render it impossible to recognize an analogy between them; for even irritability, the one grand character of all living beings, is not more difficult to be conceived of as a property of matter than the physical phenomena of radial energy.

It is quite true that between lifeless and living matter there is a vast difference, a difference greater far than any which can be found between the most diverse manifestations of lifeless matter. Though the refined synthesis of modern chemistry may have succeeded in forming a few principles which until lately had been deemed the proper product of vitality, the fact still remains that no one has ever yet built up one particle of living matter out of lifeless elements—that every living creature, from the simplest dweller on the confines of organization up to the highest and most complex organism, has its origin in preexistent living matter—that the protoplasm of to-day is but the continuation of the protoplasm of other ages, handed down to us through periods of indefinable and indeterminable time.

Yet with all this, vast as the differences may be, there is nothing which precludes a comparison of the properties of living matter with those of lifeless.

When, however, we say that life is a property of protoplasm, we