Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 5.djvu/480

464 so, then it is what the older anatomists called a cell. Can there be colloid matter without organization? Both chemistry and physiology answer in the affirmative. It may and does so exist in abundance. But it yet remains to be shown that the substance itself, and all the other necessary external circumstances, can meet without producing or exhibiting life, Not that our experiments have ever shown a single instance of the fact. But it has never in the failures been shown that every necessary concurrent circumstance was also applied. Far have every one of the experiments been from the least pretense to a perfect repetition of the exact circumstances which in the beginning did actually witness the genesis of the germs of life. Now that we have these germs we think it easier to understand their successive reproduction than their primal genesis. How far this is from the fact we have already noted.

When we have a morsel, a drop of nitrogenized colloid matter, we can easily comprehend how the attacks of oxygen will cause the evolution of those forces which again will cause a difference of functions in different parts; which, again, by this very differentiation become organs. Without a differentiation there would be no relation of the parts; no polarity; no motion; no circulation; no duplication; no increase—the best evidence of the presence of organic life. In our most ordinary notion of a cell there is all of this; and this motion, this polarity, this circulation, can be caused by oxygen alone, attacking a suitable compound. A circulation, which is but a repetition of rhythmical motion, once set up, organization is complete. Endow this organization with continuity, or the power of repeating itself, which the rhythmical circulation and polarity are capable of doing; endow it with the power of inspiring other colloid and crystalloid atoms with like vibrations, attracting them into its own mass, and then ejecting them again, arranged in form like to the original cell, which it will continue to do from habit, and you have living creatures.

Comparatively simple as this is, we are not so much concerned at present with the origin of life as with its metamorphoses. Having life in the shape of cells, and the first must be hypothetical, how does it advance? This is biological science.

The advance of life is also simple. It progresses by characteristics which must distinguish all organization, whether of organic or of inorganic elements—cosmical, chemical, or social. It is by aggregation, as Mr. Spencer has it—by a compounding. By compounding, and by differentiation; these are the two great laws.

The primordial cell, by holding on to the new broods of cells as they seek to escape from the parent hive—by retaining them and giving them a new division of labor for the common family—compounds and increases the energy of the common organism.

Every living creature, as we now know these creatures, is a compound. Simplicity is nowhere. Even the simplest the microscope can