Even on the other hypotheses, those of the formation of discrete suns and planets by the aggregation of meteoric dust, and the compensatory dispersal of such dust by radiation pressure, apparently insurmountable difficulties arise. All such hypotheses as we have indicated assume material substance and modes of energy-transformation similar to those that we study in laboratory processes, and all such hypotheses involve the notion of the degradation of energy. So long as we suppose that all cosmic processes are transformations of extended systems of material substances we must assume that energy is dissipated at every stage of the transformation, and whenever we assume this we admit that the processes are irreversible ones, and that the material universe as a whole tends towards a condition of inertia. Yet this, we see, cannot be true, for the universe teems with diversity. Is the progress towards the ultimate state of inertia an asymptotic one, as Ward suggests? This does not help us, since all that the suggestion does is to misapply a mathematical device of service only in the treatment of the problems for which it was developed. Somewhere or other, it has been said, the second law of thermodynamics _must_ be evaded in our universe. How can it be evaded? That movement or progress which we call inorganic is a movement of energy-transformations in one direction--towards their cessation. It is a movement which we can easily reverse in imagination. A cigarette consumed by a smoker represents the downfall of energy: the cellulose and oils of the tobacco burn with the liberation of heat, and the formation of water, carbon dioxide, and some soot; and this is what happens when potential energy contained in an organised substance becomes converted into kinetic energy. Now, the opposite process can clearly be conceived--it can even be pictured. If we make a kinematographic record of the smoking of the cigarette and then reverse the direction of motion of the film, we shall see the particles of soot recombining to form the substance of the cigarette, and we can imagine the concomitant combination of the water, carbon dioxide, and other substances formed during the combustion with the absorption of kinetic energy. This is not a mere analogy, for the same reversal of ordinary chemical happening occurs whenever a green plant builds up starch from the water and carbon dioxide of the atmosphere and it also occurs whenever a chemical synthesis of an “organic” compound, like that of urea by Wöhler, or that of the sugars by Fischer, is brought about in the laboratory. In all such syntheses the experimenter _reverses_ the direction of inorganic chemical happening. He may cause endothermic chemical reactions, reactions accompanied by the absorption of available energy, to take place, and in these kinetic energy becomes transformed into potential energy. All the syntheses of organic compounds so complacently instanced by mechanistic biologists