In the very ocean deeps, insects, by the labor of ages, are enabled to construct islands, and lay the foundations of future continents. The coral insect is the great architect of the southern ocean. First a reef is formed; seeds are wafted to it, vegetation springs up, a verdant island exists; then man takes possession, and a colony is formed.
Dig down into the earth, and from a hundred yards deep, throw up a portion of soil—cover it so that no communication can take place between that earth and the surrounding air. Soon you will observe vegetation springing up—perhaps new plants, altogether unlike any thing heretofore grown in that neighborhood. During how many thousands of years has the vitality of these seeds been preserved deep in the earth's bosom! Not less wonderful is the fact stated by Lord Lindsay, who took from the hand of an Egyptian mummy a tuber, which must have been wrapped up there more than 2000 years before. It was planted, was rained and dewed upon, the sun shone on it again, and the root grew, bursting forth and blooming into a beauteous Dahlia!
At the North Pole, where you would expect life to become extinct, the snow is sometimes found of a bright red color. Examine it by the microscope, and, lo! it is covered with mushrooms, growing on the surface of the snow as their natural abode.
A philosopher distills a portion of pure water, secludes it from the air, and then places it under the influence of a powerful electric current. Living beings are stimulated into existence, the acari Crossii appear in numbers! Here we touch on the borders of a great mystery; but it is not at all more mysterious than the fact of Life itself. Philosophers know nothing about it, further than it is. The attempt to discover its cause, inevitably throws them back upon the Great First Cause. Philosophy takes refuge in religion.
Yet man is never at rest in his speculations as to causes; and he contrives all manner of theories to satisfy his demands for them. A favorite theory nowadays is what is called the Development theory, which proceeds on the assumption, that one germ of being was originally planted on the earth, and that from this germ, by the wondrous power of Life, all forms of vegetable and animal life have progressively been developed. Unquestionably, all living beings are organized on one grand plan, and the higher forms of living beings, in the process of their growth, successively pass through the lower organized forms. Thus, the human being is successively a monad, an a-vertebrated animal, an osseous fish, a turtle, a bird, a ruminant, a mammal, and lastly an infant Man. Through all these types of organization, Tiedemann has shown that the brain of man passes.
This theory, however, does nothing to explain the causes of life, or the strikingly diversified, and yet determinate characters of living beings; why some so far transcend others in the stages of development to which they ascend, and how it is that they stop there—how it is that animals succeed each other in right lines, the offspring inheriting the physical structure and the moral disposition of their parents, and never, by any chance, stopping short at any other stage of being—man, for instance, never issuing in a lion, a fish, or a polypus. We can scarcely conceive it possible that, had merely the Germ of Being been planted on the earth, and “set a-going,” any thing like the beautiful harmony and extra ordinary adaptation which is every where observable throughout the animated kingdoms of Nature, would have been secured. That there has been a grand plan of organization, on which all living beings have been formed, seems obvious enough; but to account for the diversity of being, by the theory that plants and animals have gradually advanced from lower to higher stages of being by an inherent power of self-development, is at variance with known facts, and is only an attempt to get rid of one difficulty by creating another far greater.
Chemists are equally at fault, in endeavoring to unvail the mysterious processes of Life. Before its power they stand abashed. For Life controls matter, and to a great extent overrules its combinations. An organized being is not held together by ordinary chemical affinity; nor can chemistry do any thing toward compounding organized tissues. The principles which enter into the composition of the organized being are few, the chief being charcoal and water, but into what wondrous forms does Life mould these common [pg 502] elements! The chemist can tell you what these elements are, and how they are combined, when dead; but when living, they resist all his power of analysis. Rudolphi confesses that chemistry is able to investigate only the lifeless remains of organized beings.
There are some remarkable facts connected with Animal Chemistry—if we may employ the term—which show how superior is the principle of Life to all known methods of synthesis and analysis. For example, much more carbon or charcoal is regularly voided from the respiratory organs alone, of all living beings—not to speak of its ejection in many other ways—than can be accounted for, as having in any way entered the system. They also produce and eject much more nitrogen than they inhale. The mushroom and mustard plant, though nourished by pure water containing no nitrogen, give it off abundantly; the same is the case with zoophytes attached to rocks at the bottom of the sea; and reptiles and fishes contain it in abundance, though living and growing in pure water only. Again, plants which grow on sand containing not a particle of lime, are found to contain as much of this mineral as those which grow in a calcareous soil; and the bones of animals in New South Wales, and other districts where not an atom of lime is to be found in the soil, or in the plants from which they gather their food, contain the usual proportion of lime, though it remains an entire mystery to the chemist where they can have obtained it. The same fact is observable in the egg-shells of hens, where lime is produced in quantities for which the kind of food taken is altogether inadequate to account: as well as in the enormous deposits of coral-rock, consisting of almost pure lime, without any manifest supply of that ingredient. Chemistry fails to unravel these mysterious facts; nor can it account for the abundant production of soda, by plants growing on a soil containing not an atom of soda in any form: nor of gold in bezoards; nor of copper in some descriptions of shell-fish. These extraordinary facts seem to point to this—that many, if not most, of the elements which chemists have set down as simple, because they have failed to reduce them further, are in reality compound; and that what we regard as Elements, do not signify matters that are undecompoundable, but which are merely undecompounded by chemical processes. Life, however, which is superior to human powers of analysis, resolves and composes the ultimate atoms of things after methods of its own, but which to chemists will probably ever remain involved in mystery.
The last mystery of Life is Death. Such is the economy of living beings, that the very actions which are subservient to their preservation, tend to exhaust and destroy them. Each being has its definite term of life, and on attaining its acme of perfection, it begins to decay, and at length ceases to exist. This is alike true of the insect which perishes within the hour, and of the octogenarian who falls in a ripe old age. Love provides for the perpetuation of the species. “We love,” says Virey, “because we do not live forever: we purchase love at the expense of our life.” To die, is as characteristic of organized beings as to live. The one condition is necessary to the other. Death is the last of life's functions. And no sooner has the mysterious principle of vitality departed, than the laws of matter assert their power over the organized frame.
“Universal experience teaches us,” says Liebig, “that all organized beings, after death, suffer a change, in consequence of which their bodies gradually vanish from the surface of the earth. The mightiest tree, after it is cut down, disappears, with the exception, perhaps of the bark, when exposed to the action of the air for thirty or forty years. Leaves, young twigs, the straw which is added to the soil as manure, juicy fruits, &c., disappear much more quickly. In a still shorter time, animal matters lose their cohesion; they are dissipated into the air, leaving only the mineral elements which they had derived from the soil.