eaf of the plant that diverts or draws the solar energy into the
stream of life, and how it does it is a mystery.

The scientific explanations of life phenomena are all after the fact;
they do not account for the fact; they start with the ready-made
organism and then reduce its activities and processes to their physical
equivalents. Vitality is given, and then the vital processes are fitted
into mechanical and chemical concepts, or into moulds derived from inert
matter--not a difficult thing to do, but no more an explanation of the
mystery of vitality than a painting or a marble bust of Tyndall would be
an explanation of that great scientist.

All Professor Loeb's experiments and criticisms throw light upon the
life processes, or upon the factors that take part in them, but not upon
the secret of the genesis of the processes themselves. Amid all the
activities of his mechanical and chemical factors, there is ever present
a factor which he ignores, which his analytical method cannot seize;
namely, what Verworn calls "the specific energy of living substance."
Without this, chemism and mechanism would work together to quite other
ends. The water in the wave, and the laws that govern it, do not differ
at all from the water and its laws that surround it; but unless one
takes into account the force that makes the wave, an analysis of the
phenomena will leave one where he began.

Professor Le Dantec leaves the subject where he took it up, with the
origin of life and the life processes unaccounted for. His work is a
description, and not an explanation. All our ideas about vitality, or an
unknown factor in the organic world, he calls "mystic" and unscientific.
A sharp line of demarcation between living and non-living bodies is not
permissible. This, he says, is the anthropomorphic error which puts some
mysterious quality or force in all bodies considered to be living. To Le
Dantec, the difference between the quick and the dead is of the same
order as the difference which exists between two chemical compounds--for
example, as that which exists between alcohol and an aldehyde, a liquid
that has two less atoms of hydrogen in its composition. Modify your
chemistry a little, add or subtract an atom or two, more or less, of
this or that gas, and dead matter thrills into life, or living matter
sinks to the inert. In other words, life is the gift of chemistry, its
particular essence is of the chemical order--a bold inference from the