es and
the wonders of the voyage we are making upon this ship in the stellar
infinitude, and that, whatever the port, we shall still be on familiar
ground--we cannot get away from home.

There is always an activity in inert matter that we little suspect. See
the processes going on in the stratified rocks that suggest or parody
those of life. See the particles of silica that are diffused through the
limestone, hunting out each other and coming together in concretions and
forming flint or chert nodules; or see them in the process of
petrifaction slowly building up a tree of chalcedony or onyx in place of
a tree of wood, repeating every cell, every knot, every worm-hole--dead
matter copying exactly a form of living matter; or see the phenomenon of
crystallization everywhere; see the solution of salt mimicking, as
Tyndall says, the architecture of Egypt, building up miniature
pyramids, terrace upon terrace, from base to apex, forming a series of
steps like those up which the traveler in Egypt is dragged by his
guides! We can fancy, if we like, these infinitesimal structures built
by an invisible population which swarms among the constituent molecules,
controlled and coerced by some invisible matter, says Tyndall. This
might be called literature, or poetry, or religion, but it would not be
science; science says that these salt pyramids are the result of the
play of attraction and repulsion among the salt molecules themselves;
that they are self-poised and self-quarried; it goes further than that
and says that the quality we call saltness is the result of a certain
definite arrangement of their ultimate atoms of matter; that the
qualities of things as they affect our senses--hardness, softness,
sweetness, bitterness--are the result of molecular motion and
combination among the ultimate atoms. All these things seem on the
threshold of life, waiting in the antechamber, as it were; to-morrow
they will be life, or, as Tyndall says, "Incipient life, as it were,
manifests itself throughout the whole of what is called inorganic
nature."

VIII

The question of the nature and origin of life is a kind of perpetual
motion question in biology. Life without antecedent life, so far as
human experience goes, is an impossibility, and motion without previous
motion, is equally impossible. Yet, while science shows us that this
last is true among ponderable bodies where friction occurs, it is not
true among the finer particles of matter,