Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1905-11-25

ancestor of organized life, biology has
searched the deep seas and the shallow
roadside ponds with strange results. Be
ginning with the epochal years of the Chal-
lenger expedition, each year has seen new
riches added from a living world that
numbers uncounted millions more represen-
tatiyes than there are human lives. yet
whose very existence was undreamed only
a generati ton ago.
1t is the world of the diatoms and the
foraminifcra. most plentiful in the ocean.
To the naked eye they either invisible
or appear only as minute specks of dirt. 1t
takes fifteen hundred diatoms to make a
body as big as the head Of a pin.
But place one of these under a modern
high power microscope and a marvellous
thing appears
Haeckel has gathered thousands of forms
of these amazing creatures and has pub
lished hundreds of pictures, showing that
in that microscopic world alone there are
far more varieties than there are among all
the mammals of the earth
Now compare these living geometrical
forms with some that we have been ac-
customed to consider dead" crystals under
our old teaching that the world is divided
into two great classes, the organic and
the inorganic. Look at the snow crystal
engraved from a micro photograph. Look
at the sand figure made by streWing sand
on glass plate and then stroking it with
a bow. Have not those vibrations pro-
duced something strangely like the general
forms of all the others, living" and
"dead?"
Look at the sand form of Decandolle.
He made 1t by filling a little receptacle
with sand and water and then giving it a
regular. circular motion. After a while the
sand assumed form. Does that form not
look like that Of the diatom?
Then look at the thin disk of saltpeter,
as it appears under polarized light Look
at the orchid.
Modern industry, that is walking hand in
hand with even the most abstruse science
today, has furnished another demonstra-
ton.
few years ago metallurgists finished a
series of experiments that proved that
metals can catch disease They infected
zinc and tin and saw the sickness pass
through sheet after sheet like plague till
the metal crumbled away In gray powder.
They poisoned copper and iron with chemi-
Gals and saw 1t weaken, to recover the old
strength again when the poisoning was
checked. They worked metals till they
were tired out. Then they rested them and
without other treatment they won back
tneir original strength. They went even
father than that. They maltreated metals.
ard the tortured ore reacted by losing its
strength not to regain it till the infection
of cruel stress compression had ceased.
This is a theory no more. The principles
thus learned are admitted and used In all
great metaIlurglcal operations To-Day,
though the men who use the knowledge
pay no regard to its metaphysical aspect.
So in the strife to solve the riddle of
life we have gone back little farther on
the mystic trail. A few years ago we had
reached the point where We believed that
all life came out of the sea. Now We
are getting ready to believe that mans an
cestor may have been in the rock
But after all, this takes us back only
little way farther. Even the fascinating
theory that the first life reached this earth
from some other planet did not take US
far. 1t still left us helpless before the
eternal question: where and how did life
originate on that other planet?
So 1t Is with the rock. II Capitalization
is life what started the first wonderful
movement of the first atom?
\ few years ago specialists might have
answered: Chemical action. But today the
very bases of the theory of chemistry are
being attacked by new theory. That Is
that every operation in the world Is cleo
trical-in the world of mind as well as
matter. ~