Page:Life in Motion.djvu/41

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LIMITED CONDITIONS OF LIFE
21

and the phenomenon he is in search of cannot be found. Modify the conditions of life beyond certain limits, and death at once begins. In trying to find out what are the phenomena of life we arrest the very phenomena we are in search of. Thus we kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.

Look at this piece of clockwork. Suppose I saw it for the first time and desired to know how it worked. I could do so by watching the movements, observing the slow uncoiling of the chain, and the movements of pinion and toothed wheel. I might also take it to pieces and study the various parts. By taking it to pieces the mechanism no doubt would stop, but I might, by careful consideration of how one thing fitted into another, ascertain how the thing worked.

The body may be regarded as an extremely complex machine, intimately connected in all its parts, but yet it is possible to make out, by direct inspection, something about the uses of its individual parts. We can see that the skeleton forms a scaffolding for the soft parts of the body, that the muscles and joints form a system of levers by which movements are