The scientific explanation of life phenomena is analogous to reducing a living body to its ashes and pointing to them—­the lime, the iron, the phosphorus, the hydrogen, the oxygen, the carbon, the nitrogen—­as the whole secret.

Professor Czapek is not entirely consistent.  He says that it is his conviction that there is something in physiology that transcends the chemistry and the physics of inorganic nature.  At the same time he affirms, “It becomes more and more improbable that Life develops forces which are unknown in inanimate Nature.”  But psychic forces are a product of life, and they certainly are not found in inanimate nature.  But without laying stress upon this fact, may we not say that if no new force is developed by, or is characteristic of, life, certainly new effects, new processes, new compounds of matter are produced by life?  Matter undergoes some change that chemical analysis does not reveal.  The mystery of isomeric substances appears, a vast number of new compounds of carbon appear, the face of the earth changes.  The appearance of life in inert matter is a change analogous to the appearance of the mind of man in animate nature.  The old elements and forces are turned to new and higher uses.  Man does not add to the list of forces or elements in the earth, but he develops them, and turns them to new purposes; they now obey and serve him, just as the old chemistry and physics obey and serve life.  Czapek tells us of the vast number of what are called enzymes, or ferments, that appear in living bodies—­“never found in inorganic Nature and not to be gained by chemical synthesis.”  Orders and suborders of enzymes, they play a part in respiration, in digestion, in assimilation.  Some act on the fats, some on the carbohydrates, some produce inversion, others dissolution and precipitation.  These enzymes are at once the products and the agents of life.  They must exert force, chemical force, or, shall we say, they transform chemical force into life force, or, to use Professor Moore’s term, into “biotic energy”?

III

The inorganic seems dreaming of the organic.  Behold its dreams in the fern and tree forms upon the window pane and upon the stone flagging of a winter morning!  In the Brunonian movement of matter in solution, in crystallization, in chemical affinity, in polarity, in osmosis, in the growth of flint or chert nodules, in limestone formations—­like seeking like—­in these and in other activities, inert matter seems dreaming of life.

The chemists have played upon this tendency in the inorganic to parody or simulate some of the forms of living matter.  A noted European chemist, Dr. Leduc, has produced what he calls “osmotic growths,” from purely unorganized mineral matter—­growths in form like seaweed and polyps and corals and trees.  His seeds are fragments of calcium chloride, and his soil is a solution of the alkaline carbonates, phosphates,