The Breath of Life | Page 8

sprouting beechnuts had sent their pale radicles down

through the dry leaves upon which they were lying, often piercing two
or three of them, and forcing their way down into the mingled soil and
leaf-mould a couple of inches. Force was certainly expended in doing
this, and if the life in the sprouting nut did not exert it or expend it,
what did?
When I drive a peg into the ground with my axe or mallet, is the life in
my arm any more strictly the source (the secondary source) of the
energy expended than is the nut in this case? Of course, the sun is the
primal source of the energy in both cases, and in all cases, but does not
life exert the force, use it, bring it to bear, which it receives from the
universal fount of energy?
Life cannot supply energy de novo, cannot create it out of nothing, but
it can and must draw upon the store of energy in which the earth floats
as in a sea. When this energy or force is manifest through a living body,
we call it vital force; when it is manifest through a mechanical
contrivance, we call it mechanical force; when it is developed by the
action and reaction of chemical compounds, we call it chemical force;
the same force in each case, but behaving so differently in the one case
from what it does in the other that we come to think of it as a new and
distinct entity. Now if Sir Oliver or any one else could tell us what
force is, this difference between the vitalists and the mechanists might
be reconciled.
Darwin measured the force of the downward growth of the radicle,
such as I have alluded to, as one quarter of a pound, and its lateral
pressure as much greater. We know that the roots of trees insert
themselves into seams in the rocks, and force the parts asunder. This
force is measurable and is often very great. Its seat seems to be in the
soft, milky substance called the cambium layer under the bark. These
minute cells when their force is combined may become regular
rock-splitters.
One of the most remarkable exhibitions of plant force I ever saw was in
a Western city where I observed a species of wild sunflower forcing its
way up through the asphalt pavement; the folded and compressed
leaves of the plant, like a man's fist, had pushed against the hard but

flexible concrete till it had bulged up and then split, and let the
irrepressible plant through. The force exerted must have been many
pounds. I think it doubtful if the strongest man could have pushed his
fist through such a resisting medium. If it was not life which exerted
this force, what was it? Life activities are a kind of explosion, and the
slow continued explosions of this growing plant rent the pavement as
surely as powder would have done. It is doubtful if any cultivated plant
could have overcome such odds. It required the force of the untamed
hairy plant of the plains to accomplish this feat.
That life does not supply energy, that is, is not an independent source
of energy, seems to me obvious enough, but that it does not manifest
energy, use energy, or "exert force," is far from obvious. If a growing
plant or tree does not exert force by reason of its growing, or by virtue
of a specific kind of activity among its particles, which we name life,
and which does not take place in a stone or in a bar of iron or in dead
timber, then how can we say that any mechanical device or explosive
compound exerts force? The steam-engine does not create force,
neither does the exploding dynamite, but these things exert force. We
have to think of the sum total of the force of the universe, as of matter
itself, as a constant factor, that can neither be increased nor diminished.
All activity, organic and inorganic, draws upon this force: the plant and
tree, as well as the engine and the explosive--the winds, the tides, the
animal, the vegetable alike. I can think of but one force, but of any
number of manifestations of force, and of two distinct kinds of
manifestations, the organic and the inorganic, or the vital and the
physical,--the latter divisible into the chemical and the mechanical, the
former made up of these two working in infinite complexity because
drawn into new relations, and lifted to higher ends by this something
we call life.
We think of something in the organic that lifts and moves and
redistributes dead matter, and builds it up into the ten thousand new
forms which it would never assume without this something; it lifts lime