That is to say, life arose through a recombination of forces preexisting in the cosmos, and the fact was but a step in the evolutionary process. "Such evolution," the American biologist, Henry Fairfield Osborn, declares with emphasis, "is essentially constructive, and ... is continually giving birth to an infinite variety of new forms and functions which never appeared in the universe before. It is a continuous creation or creative evolution. Although this creative power is something new derived from the old, it presents the first of the numerous contrasts between the living and the lifeless world." LIFE'S BORDERLAND Although in some respects a deceptive resemblance may appear between the living and the nonliving, the distinction is definite. Living bodies, plant or animal, are made up of protoplasm, which, although mineral in substance, consists of a combination never found in the mineral kingdom. It gives to the body containing it the power of growth, and this growth is by additions from within. Minerals may increase in size, but only by additions from without. The prime characteristics of living organisms is that they reproduce their kind, given favorable conditions. Minerals never do so. A correlative of life and growth is death, but minerals never die. In the course of its career every animal or plant, in proportion to its need or the degree of complexity of its organs, develops within itself characteristic compounds, such as albumin, gluten, starch, cellulose, fat and other chemical results, not a trace of any of which is to be found in rocks or soil, or in the water or in the air. No distinction in nature is so absolute as that between the inorganic and the organic realms, the nonliving and living things, so far as our senses can perceive them. When, however, we consider the two prime divisions of the living world--animal and vegetable--so diverse in their higher developments, we find them springing from the same base in a single cell of almost structureless protoplasm, and so alike in this simplest form as to be in some cases indistinguishable--mere drops of living matter whose functions are so limited that they present no discriminative characteristics. Indeed, marking a definite boundary between animals and plants may be difficult in cases much higher in the scale than these primitive globules of protoplasm.