Explore "The Breath of Life" by John Burroughs on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
If life itself is not a force or a form of energy, yet behold what energy it is capable of exerting! It seems to me that Sir Oliver Lodge is a little confusing when he says in a recent essay that "life does not exert force -- not even the most microscopical force -- and certainly does not supply energy. " Sir Oliver is thinking of life as a distinct entity -- something apart from the matter which it animates. But even in this case can we not say that the mainspring of the energy of living bodies is the life that is in them?
Apart from the force exerted by living animal bodies, see the force exerted by living plant bodies. I thought of the remark of Sir Oliver one day not long after reading it, while I was walking in a beech wood and noted how the 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?