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Updated: June 10, 2025
We see the inorganic pass into the organic, we see iron and lime and potash and silex blush in the flowers, sweeten in the fruit, ripen in the grain, crimson in the blood, and we marvel not. We see the spotless pond-lily rising and unfolding its snowy petals, and its trembling heart of gold, from the black slime of the pond.
Now let us once suppose imaginary human spectators of every first appearance of these phenomena. Would he who thus far had only known inorganic phenomena and processes, have dared, before the appearance of life, to utter the proposition: matter can also become living and live? And who would have dared to suggest the further doctrine: matter can also feel and get a consciousness of things?
Now, this want of comprehensive views of chemical reactions, their why and wherefore, was bad enough as it affected the study of inorganic and metallic compounds, but what must have been the conditions for studying the complex compounds of carbon, so widely spread in the vegetable and animal kingdoms.
Here is a theory, open to objections certainly, not yet conclusively demonstrated, but the most probable one which we yet possess, as to the method of the appearance and the continuance of life upon the planet. It conceives of creation as an unimaginably long and intricate development from the inorganic to the organic, from simple to complex forms of life.
So whether we consider the life which characterizes organized matter, or the energy which characterizes inorganic matter, we cannot avoid the conclusion, that both must have their source in some Original Power to which we can assign no antecedent.
To his mind this excluded the thought of catastrophic changes in either inorganic or organic worlds. But to deny catastrophism was to suggest a revolution in current thought. Needless to say, such revolution could not be effected without a long contest. For a score of years the matter was argued pro and con., often with most unscientific ardor.
At first, protoplasm could have had no proclivities to one or other arrangement of parts; unless, indeed, a purely mechanical proclivity towards a spherical form when suspended in a liquid. At the outset it must have been passive. In respect of its passivity, primitive organic matter must have been like inorganic matter.
But the forest, regarded purely as inorganic matter, and without reference to its living processes of absorption and exhalation of gases and of water, has, as an absorbent, a radiator and a conductor of heat, and as a mere covering of the ground, an influence on the temperature of the air and the earth, which may be considered by itself. Absorbing and Emitting Surface.
It is for the organic world what that popular view is for the inorganic; and the accepters of the latter stand in a position from which to regard the former in the most favorable light. Wherefore the rumor that the cautious Lyell himself has adopted the Darwinian hypothesis need not surprise us.
We now definitely know that the organic world on our earth has been as continuously developed, "in accordance with eternal iron laws," as Lyell had in 1830 shown to be the case for the inorganic frame of the earth itself; we know that the innumerable varieties of animals and plants which during the course of millions of years have peopled our planet are all simply branches of one single genealogical tree; we know that the human race itself forms only one of the newest, highest, and most perfect offshoots from the race of the Vertebrates.
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