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Adaptation, of course, has its physics or its chemistry, because it is a physical phenomenon; but there is no adaptation of a rock or a clay-bank to its environment; there is only mechanical and chemical adjustment. The influence of the environment may bring about chemical and physical changes in a non-living body, but they are not purposive as in a living body.
It reproduces itself, as we have seen, by separation and self-division. The life of the bacteria and germs the yeasty forms of life are familiar to many of us. And yet there are forms of life still below these. The line between living forms and non-living forms is being set back further and further by science.
Where, and on what principle, are the dividing lines between living and non-living to be drawn? Is the line to be so drawn as to admit any of the non-living within the body?
And there is as certainly as wide or a wider difference between living and non-living matter, though it be beyond the reach of science to detect. For this difference we have to have a name, and we use the words "vital," "vitality," which seem to me to stand for as undeniable realities as the words heat, light, chemical affinity, gravitation.
The scientific people have puzzled their heads not a little over the question where the life on this planet came from. They cannot make up their minds to say that it came from non-living matter; and some of them have ventured a guess that the first germs might have been brought by a meteorite from some distant planet.
Two or three points of suggestive analogy between the courses of the two great branches of science may here be mentioned. We will put first the fundamental question on which, as we have seen, no final answer has yet been reached: What is life, and is there any evidence of life arising from the non-living?
For if bodily and non-bodily organs are essentially one in kind, being each of them both living and non-living, and each of them only a higher development of principles already admitted and largely acted on in the other, then the method of procedure observable in the evolution of the organs whose history is within our ken should throw light upon the evolution of that whose history goes back into so dim a past that we can only know it by way of inference.
As the bricklayer is held to be living and the bricks non-living, so the bones and skin which protoplasm is supposed to construct are held non-living and the protoplasm alone living. Protoplasm, it is said, goes about masked behind the clothes or habits which it has fashioned.
But, of course, in it the mechanical, the chemical, and the vital are so blended, so interdependent, that we may never hope to separate them; but without the activity called vital, there would be no cell, and hence no body. It were unreasonable to expect that scientific analysis should show that the physics and chemistry of a living body differs from that of the non-living.
The evolution theory, stretching from matter to man, is impossible, because of many impassable gulfs. Some of these impassable gulfs are: Between the living and non-living or dead matter; 2. Between the vegetable and the animal kingdoms; 3. Between the invertebrates and the vertebrates; 4. Between marine animals and amphibians; 5. Between amphibians and reptiles; 6. Between reptiles and birds; 7.
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