up in our airless flasks: to reduce it to some unknown correlate of motion
because it constantly defies our poor mental grasp; to insist upon its
artificial production because elementary substances may be chemically
handled in our laboratories--is the same sort of preposterous folly that
Newton would have been guilty of, had he attempted to show that there was
no such thing as "gravity" in the universe; that it was only some
undiscovered correlative of a thermal limit,--some unknown molecular
complexity or entanglement in cosmic ether--some spontaneously occurring
affinity or antagonism of ethereal molecules in the interplanetary
spaces--some "potentiated potentiality" of mere sky-mist,--conditions of
which he could have had no experimental knowledge, nor have given the
slightest analogical proof. That we are justified in thus partially
travestying the technical methods of some of our modern scientists, so
called--especially those of the materialistic school--those advocating a
purely physical theory of life, we need only quote a sentence or two from
Professor Lionel S. Beale, of King's College, London. This eminent
physiologist, in his recent work on "The Mystery of Life," says:
"Notwithstanding all that has been asserted to the contrary, not one vital
action has yet been accounted for by physics and chemistry. The assertion
that life is correlated force rests upon assertion alone, and we are just
as far from an explanation of vital phenomena by force-hypotheses as we
were before the discovery of the doctrine of the correlation of forces."
And he further adds that each additional year's labor, in this special
field of investigation, "only confirms him more strongly than ever in the
opinion that the physical doctrine of life cannot be sustained."

Many able and eminently learned physiologists have been disposed to
recognize the presence of pre-existing "germs" in the earth, but not to
the extent of accounting for all life-manifestations therein, as the
doctrine is conclusively taught in the Bible Genesis. The language of this