The Breath of Life by John Burroughs — Read

The electric constitution of matter is quite beyond anything we can imagine. The atoms are little worlds by themselves, and the whole mystery of life and death is in their keeping. The whole difference in the types of mind and character among men is supposed to be in their keeping. The different qualities and properties of bodies are in their keeping. Whether an object is hot or cold to our senses, depends upon the character of their vibrations; whether it be sweet or sour, poisonous or innocuous to us, depends upon how the atoms select their partners in the whirl and dance of their activities. The hardness and brilliancy of the diamond is supposed to depend upon how the atoms of carbon unite and join hands.

I have heard the view expressed that all matter, as such, is dead matter, that the molecules of hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, iron, phosphorus, calcium, and so on, in a living body, are themselves no more alive than the same molecules in inorganic matter. Nearly nine tenths of a living body is water; is not this water the same as the water we get at the spring or the brook? is it any more alive? does water undergo any chemical change in the body? is it anything more than a solvent, than a current that carries the other elements to all parts of the body? There are any number of chemical changes or reactions in a living body, but are the atoms and molecules that are involved in such changes radically changed? Can oxygen be anything but oxygen, or carbon anything but carbon? Is what we call life the result of their various new combinations? Many modern biologists hold to this view. In this conception merely a change in the order of arrangement of the molecules of a substance -- which follows which or which is joined to which -- is fraught with consequences as great as the order in which the letters of the alphabet are arranged in words, or the words themselves are arranged in sentences. The change of one letter in a word often utterly changes the meaning of that word, and the changing of a word in the sentence may give expression to an entirely different idea. Reverse the letters in the word "God," and you get the name of our faithful friend the dog.