water is
friendly to the swimmer, if he knows how to use it; if not, it is his
deadly enemy. The same is true of all the elements and forces of nature.
Whether they be for or against us, depends upon ourselves. The wind is
never tempered to the shorn lamb, the shorn lamb must clothe itself
against the wind. Life is adaptive, and this faculty of adaptation to
the environment, of itself takes it out of the category of the
physico-chemical. The rivers and seas favor navigation, if we have
gumption enough to use and master their forces. The air is good to
breathe, and food to eat, for those creatures that are adapted to them.
Bergson thinks, not without reason, that life on other planets may be
quite different from what it is on our own, owing to a difference in
chemical and physical conditions. Change the chemical constituents of
sea water, and you radically change the lower organisms. With an
atmosphere entirely of oxygen, the processes of life would go on more
rapidly and perhaps reach a higher form of development. Life on this
planet is limited to a certain rather narrow range of temperature; the
span may be the same in other worlds, but farther up or farther down the
scale. Had the air been differently constituted, would not our lungs
have been different? The lungs of the fish are in his gills: he has to
filter his air from a much heavier medium. The nose of the pig is fitted
for rooting; shall we say, then, that the soil was made friable that
pigs might root in it? The webbed foot is fitted to the water; shall we
say, then, that water is liquid in order that geese and ducks may swim
in it? One more atom of oxygen united to the two atoms that go to make
the molecule of air, and we should have had ozone instead of the air we
now breathe. How unsuited this would have made the air for life as we
know it! Oxidation would have consumed us rapidly. Life would have met
this extra atom by some new device.

One wishes Professor Henderson had told us more about how life fits
itself to the environment--how matter, moved and moulded only by
mechanical and chemical forces, yet has some power of choice that a
machine does not have, and can and does select the environment best
suited to its well-being. In fact, that it should have, or be capable
of, any condition of well-being, if it is only a complex of physical and
chemical forces, is a problem to wrestle with. The ground we walk on is
such a complex, but only the living bodies it