f bees find out the secret of its
organization--its unity as an aggregate of living insects? Behold its
wonderful economics, its division of labor, its complex social
structure,--the queen, the workers, the drones,--thousands of bees
without any head or code of laws or directing agent, all acting as one
individual, all living and working for the common good. There is no
confusion or cross-purpose in the hive. When the time of swarming comes,
they are all of one mind and the swarm comes forth. Who or what decides
who shall stay and who shall go? When the honey supply fails, or if it
fail prematurely, on account of a drought, the swarming instinct is
inhibited, and the unhatched queens are killed in their cells. Who or
what issues the regicide order? We can do no better than to call it the
Spirit of the Hive, as Maeterlinck has done. It is a community of mind.
What one bee knows and feels, they all know and feel at the same
instant. Something like that is true of a living body; the cells are
like the bees: they work together, they build up the tissues and organs,
some are for one thing and some for another, each community of cells
plays its own part, and they all pull together for the good of the
whole. We can introduce cells and even whole organs, for example a
kidney from another living body, and all goes well; and yet we cannot
find the seat of the organization. Can we do any better than to call it
the Spirit of the Body?

IV

Our French biologist is of the opinion that the artificial production of
that marvel of marvels, the living cell, will yet take place in the
laboratory. But the enlightened mind, he says, does not need such proof
to be convinced that there is no essential difference between living and
non-living matter.

Professor Henderson, though an expounder of the mechanistic theory of
the origin of life, admits that he does not know of a biological chemist
to whom the "mechanistic origin of a cell is scientifically imaginable."
Like Professor Loeb, he starts with the vital; how he came by it we get
no inkling; he confesses frankly that the biological chemist cannot even
face the problem of the origin of life. He quotes with approval a remark
of Liebig's, as reported by Lord Kelvin, that he (Liebig) could no more
believe that a leaf or a flower could be formed or could grow by
chemical forces "than a book on chemistry, or on botany, could grow out
of dead matter." Is not this conceding to the vitalists a