BIOLOGY
Is scientific discourse about life and vital forces. We give it a high position in the circle, since vitality is superior to either chemical or mechanical laws, suspending or modifying them for the production of organized structures of plants and animals. Even vegetable biology confronts us with that mystery of mysteries, life, which is quite inexplicable. We can only say it is a peculiar, indefinable something, necessary to the existence of such organisms, and without which they soon sink in ruinous decay.
The living germ is the determining power that shapes the organic body, and every germ will have its own body. Under no possible culture can the acorn develop into an animal. It will produce an oak, a tree of its own species, and nothing else can grow from it. So also of the animal germ. The form or kind is as determinate while the embryo is yet in the egg, as it will ever be. The life once begun in everything that lives and grows, there is a power that takes hold of the elements nature has in store for it, and, by a most wonderful transformation, works them up into its own body; and this power of assimilation must forever distinguish it from all lifeless inorganic matter.
The mystery deepens when we notice that living things exist in generations. The plant has seed in itself for the production of another plant. It has life in itself, and power to vitalize its successors. The products of the field and the forest grow and mature, then wither and decay; but they have successors of the same kind.
So human beings exist in successive generations. One generation passeth away, and another cometh, and so the race lives on. While alike in their power of assimilation and reproduction, there is a wide difference between the vegetable and the animal. They have not the same organs, and do not subsist on the same food. The plant is constantly consuming carbonic acid, and giving out oxygen, while animals consume the oxygen, and restore to the atmosphere carbonic acid. The difference of their physical structure, and their different relations to inorganic matter, suggest a wide difference in the “bios” or life, that animates them. Just what that difference is, no one can tell. It is a question for which science furnishes no answer. In his physical organization man differs but little from the lower animals. In this he is brother to the beasts that perish, having the same nature, needs, and liabilities. If he is “fearfully and wonderfully made,” so are they; in agility and strength many of them far surpass him. His peculiarities of form and structure do not secure, and, it may be safely said, were not intended to secure physical superiority, but rather to fit the organization for the indwelling of the rational soul, that is his distinguishing characteristic.