so the end of our boasted
science.

Science is at home in discussing all the material manifestations of
life--the parts played by colloids and ferments, by fluids and gases,
and all the organic compounds, and by mechanical and chemical
principles; it may analyze and tabulate all life processes, and show the
living body as a most wonderful and complex piece of mechanism, but
before the question of the origin of life itself it stands dumb, and,
when speaking through such a man as Tyndall, it also stands humble and
reverent. After Tyndall had, to his own satisfaction, reduced all like
phenomena to mechanical attraction and repulsion, he stood with
uncovered head before what he called the "mystery and miracle of
vitality." The mystery and miracle lie in the fact that in the organic
world the same elements combine with results so different from those of
the inorganic world. Something seems to have inspired them with a new
purpose. In the inorganic world, the primary elements go their ceaseless
round from compound to compound, from solid to fluid or gaseous, and
back again, forming the world of inert matter as we know it, but in the
organic world the same elements form thousands of new combinations
unknown to them before, and thus give rise to the myriad forms of life
that inhabit the earth.

The much-debated life question has lately found an interesting exponent
in Professor Benjamin Moore, of the University of Liverpool. His volume
on the subject in the "Home University Library" is very readable, and,
in many respects, convincing. At least, so far as it is the word of
exact science on the subject it is convincing; so far as it is
speculative, or philosophical, it is or is not convincing, according to
the type of mind of the reader. Professor Moore is not a bald mechanist
or materialist like Professor Loeb, or Ernst Haeckel, nor is he an
idealist or spiritualist, like Henri Bergson or Sir Oliver Lodge. He may
be called a scientific vitalist. He keeps close to lines of scientific
research as these lines lead him through the maze of the primordial
elements of matter, from electron to atom, from atom to molecule, from
molecule to colloid, and so up to the border of the living world. His
analysis of the processes of molecular physics as they appear in the
organism leads him to recognize and to name a new force, or a new
manifestation of force, which he hesitates to call vital, because of the
associations of this term with a pr