Excerpt from Life What, then, is life? I will begin by calling your attention to one of the lowest and most simple forms of organic life with which we are familiar. If you will take a small bit of fresh and healthy substance, either animal or vegetable, and place it in a little wineglass of water and let it be there for some time in a sunny place, in a warm room, you will find that, after a few days, it will be swarming with life, little forms of organic life that are called amoebae. An amoeba is only a little jelly-like globule but it possesses most wonderful powers, and has within itself the promise and the potency of such development as that of which we cannot even yet dream the end. This little creature, hardly to be called organic in the ordinary sense at all, is yet endowed with certain marvellous faculties. Let me describe it, so far as the main distinctions are concerned between it and the other kind of matter which we call dead, which I prefer to call inorganic, because, as we shall see very soon, we have outgrown the use of the word dead as applied to anything in this universe. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.