"I will endeavour to answer your question," said Delapine, "but my knowledge is too limited to give you really satisfactory answers. All attempts to explain life by experiments in the laboratory, by chemistry, or by physics are equally futile. Bastian, Tyndall, Büchner, Stokes, Haeckel, Kelvin, Butler-Burke, Schaefer, and a host of others have essayed to explain life, and all have failed utterly. The hypothesis of Arrhenius that life in the first instance was brought to this planet from some other world by the pressure of radiation, or the theory of Lord Kelvin that the primeval germ travelled here on the back of a meteorite can only be received with an incredulous smile as being more suited for a romance of the Jules Verne type than a topic for serious consideration. "The relation between life and energy, or between life and electricity or magnetism has never been established. I will even go further, I maintain that no such relation ever will be established. Nor will it ever be possible for the chemist to manufacture life out of any substance be it simple or compound. Life, I contend, is eternal, and consequently uncreated, for what has an end must of necessity have had a beginning. Life seems to be independent of energy, and consequently it will never be manufactured in the laboratory by any process, nor can Nature produce it 'de novo.' All efforts to describe it are futile. We only know that it is a mysterious 'something' which, acting through protoplasm, enables an organised substance or 'body' to overcome inertia and resist decay. The proof that life is akin to mind lies in the fact that as soon as the organized substance is endowed with life, it not only transforms other substances outside its body into its own substance, but it does more--it even exercises a power of selection or choice. It refuses one substance which may be unsuitable to its well being, and accepts another which it prefers for private reasons. In a word it endows the speck of protoplasm which constitutes the organism with a will of its own. It is as if it would say to the organism 'Eritis sicut Deus scientes bonum et malum.' Is not that a proof of mind, eh? One thing is certain, wherever and whenever the conditions are such as to render life possible, life will immediately begin to assert itself, not by any ultra-scientific process, but through the eternal and unchangeable laws by and through which Nature has ever worked." "Is there any purpose in our being born in a frail body like this?" asked Riche. "In fact why should we have a body at all?"