The Breath of Life by John Burroughs — Read

We have a good illustration of the power of chemistry, and how closely it is dogging the footsteps of life, in the many organic compounds it has built up out of the elements, such as sugar, starch, indigo, camphor, rubber, and so forth, all of which used to be looked upon as impossible aside from life-processes. It is such progress as this that leads some men of science to believe that the creation of life itself is within the reach of chemistry. I do not believe that any occult or transcendental principle bars the way, but that some unknown and perhaps unknowable condition does, as mysterious and unrepeatable as that which separates our mental life from our physical. The transmutation of the physical into the psychical takes place, but the secret of it we do not know. It does not seem to fall within the law of the correlation and the conservation of energy.

Free or single atoms are very rare; they all quickly find their mates or partners. This eagerness of the elements to combine is one of the mysteries. If the world of visible matter were at one stroke resolved into its constituent atoms, it would practically disappear; we might smell it, or taste it, if we were left, but we could not see it, or feel it; the water would vanish, the solid ground would vanish -- more than half of it into oxygen atoms, and the rest mainly into silicon atoms.