The science of life : fully illustrated in tone and line and including many diagrams

INTRODUCTION

THE RANGE, NATURE, AND STUDY OF LIVING THINGS

§ 1. The Origin and Aim of this Book. § 2. What do we Mean by Life? 8§ 3. The

Limitation of Life in Space.

§ 4. Is there Extra-terrestrial Life? § 5. The Sub-

jective Side of Life. § 6. A Preliminary View of Living Forms. 9 7. The Progress of Biological Knowledge.

§ 1 The Origin and Aim of this Book

FEW years ago one of the writers of this

book made a summary of historical knowledge called The Outline of History. He dealt with all history as one process. He displayed it—or, rather, it displayed itself as he gathered his material and joined part to part—as the appearance of life in space and time, and as an achievement of self-knowledge and a release of will; a story unfolding and developing by a kind of inner necessity, until at last man was revealed becoming creative, becoming conscious of the possibility of controlling his destiny and groping through kingdoms and empires and wars and revolutionary conflicts towards unity and power. This epic story, presented plainly though it was, without any attempt at literary flourishes or poetic passages, seized upon the imaginations of a great number of people. It placed them in relation to the whole scheme of things. It joined up such historical facts as they knew into a whole. It explained their patriotic feelings, cleared up their conceptions of international relationships, and rationalized their political and social activities. It was something for which they had been ripe, and were waiting, and the book had a success altogether beyond the deserts of its learning or its literary quality.

Men and women turned to it from the previous outline of history upon which, consciously or unconsciously, they had hitherto: based their general conception of world events—the historical portion of the Bible, supplemented by some scraps of classical literature, and their own national record. For modern needs a history which Opened with barbaric myths, which concerned itself mainly with the tribal affairs of the Jews, which disregarded the past of nearly all the world outside Syria and Egypt, and ended two thousand years ago, had become insufficient. Little by little a vaster

Genesis had been written by science, and unobtrusively, detail by detail, the scholarly excavator had opened up mightier Chronicles and pieced together a more splendid roll of Kings. A broader world had grown in human experience and now altogether dwarfs the fortunes of Palestine and the jurisdiction of the Cesars. For all its faults, its compiled quality, its pedestrian if unpretentious prose and much incidental sketchiness, The Outline of History brought something of the greatness of these new vistas before the minds of many for the first time. They lived, they realized, upon a wider stage, and the things of the present in which their activities mingled had a greater significance than they had supposed.

But it is not only in the field of human history that our science has been enormously expanded. Our realization of the nature of life, our knowledge of its processes, has been changed, deepened, and intensified. A great and growing volume of fact about life as it goes on about us and within us becomes available for practical application. It reflects upon the conduct of our lives throughout ; it throws new light upon our moral judgments ; it suggests fresh methods of human co-operation, imposes novel conceptions of service, and opens new possibilities and new freedoms to us.

Much of this new material is still imperfectly accessible to ordinary busy people. It is embodied in scientific publications, in a multitude of books ; it is expressed in technical terms that have still to be translated into ordinary language; it is mixed up with masses of controversial matter, and with unsound and pretentious publications. Complicated with the clear statements of indubitable science there is a more questionable literature of less strictly observed psychology, and a great undigested accumulation of reports and statements turning upon current necromancy, thought-transference, speculations about immortality, willpower, and the like. Mingled with orthodox