(1802)
LIFE, ORIGIN OF
The old philosophers who held that all things originated in the sea were not far out of the way, if we are to believe some of the latest biological theories or speculations. That organic evolution began with marine creatures, Haeckel told us long ago. That sea-water is a particularly sympathetic medium for vital processes, has more lately been shown by Loeb in his experiments on the fertilization of the eggs of certain marine creatures. M. René Quinton, of the Laboratory of Pathologic Physiology of the College de France, has published a book, entitled “Sea-water as an Organic Medium,” in which he asserts that as the cell itself has persisted in living organisms, being practically the same in the human body as in our earliest marine predecessors, so the conditions of its life closely reproduce those of primordial times. The cell in our own bodies is bathed in a fluid that closely resembles sea-water in chemical composition and that approximates in temperature to that of the ocean when life first appeared in it. (Text.)
(1803)
LIFE, PASSION FOR
Ponce de Leon searched Florida for the spring of the elixir of life; thousands of alchemists have attempted to concoct it; innumerable patent medicines in every drugstore testify to the universal effort to prolong earthly existence; a miser will fling away his last piece of gold to save his life; lawyers will battle to the last device of law to save a client from execution if only to prolong his existence in a prison; and tho Bacon says “there is no passion so mean as that it can not mate and master the fear of death,” he was speaking only of sudden and occasional passions. The rule is that passion to live outmasters all other passions.
What a word then is this of Jesus when He says, “I came that they might have life.”
(1804)
LIFE, PERSISTENCE OF
A spring of air never loses its elasticity; but it never gains an energy which it had not at first. Tho prest a thousand years under incumbent weights, the instant they are removed it reassumes its original volume; but it gathers no more from the long repose. But the life in the seed tends constantly toward development, into the stalk, the blossom and the fruit. As long as the seed remains perfect and vital, this tendency remains, inhering in it; so that three thousand years after it was shaken from the wheat-ear on the Nile, if planted it develops and brings forth fruit in English gardens.—Richard S. Storrs.