[Footnote 16: _Principles of Biology_, vol. i. p. 481.] The justification of all this is the affirmation ‘that organic matter was not produced all at once,’ and that there is in the laboratory of the chemist ‘what we may literally call artificial evolution.’ Mr. Spencer instances a laboratory product of what is counted a sufficiently typical organic compound.[17] But to obtain it the chemist has to employ no less than twenty distinct chemical and physical processes, involving many varying temperatures, from a red heat to the intensity of the electric arc, and between thirty and forty reagents and their products, are employed in the process. Compare this with the silent and impenetrable simplicity of the chemistry of life, and vivid and striking is the contrast. And yet when this product of the chemist lies before you, produced by the tremendous relative labours of the laboratory, it is as far off from dead white of egg, to say nothing of living protoplasm, as the qualities of a flint pebble are from the qualities of the diamond. [Footnote 17: The Butyrate of dimethylamin.] The _facts_ of nature—surely our safest guide—declare that the transition from not-life to life is abrupt. The break is absolute and clear. A ‘complex molecule’ is a molecule of atoms in motion,—nothing more. More atoms and more motion cannot, by themselves, as Mr. Spencer would teach, make it ‘organic;’ much less can any further addition of atoms and tremors make it live. It is in vain for Haeckel to call the simplest moneron that lives ‘primeval slime,’ or to call numbers of them ‘individualized lumps of albumen.’ It is a travesty. Under the same lens place ‘a lump of albumen’ and the lowest _living_ infusorian, and a voiceless contradiction of Haeckel’s phrase which none can ever question is indubitably given. The infusorian lives; the albumen is dead. The infusorian constructs the vital matter of its own body from the heterogeneous matter in which it lives; the albumen decomposes as it lies there. The infusorian has soon multiplied by millions, while the albumen disappears by decadence. To write of living monera as ‘albumen,’ or of ‘complex molecules’ with nothing more than their complexity, as _living_, is to contradict, in the name, the essential and distinguishing qualities of both.