When I want to know why a leaf is green, they tell me it is
colored by "chlorophyll," which at first sounds very instructive; but if
they would only say plainly that a leaf is colored green by a thing which
is called "green leaf," we should see more precisely how far we had got.
However, it is a curious fact that life is connected with a cellular
structure called protoplasm, or in English, "first stuck together;"
whence, conceivably through deuteroplasms, or second stickings, and
tritoplasms, or third stickings,* we reach the highest plastic phase in
the human pottery, which differs from common chinaware, primarily, by a
measurable degree of heat, developed in breathing, which it borrows from
the rest of the universe while it lives, and which it as certainly
returns to the rest of the universe, when it dies.
58. Again, with this heat certain assimilative powers are connected,
which the tendency of recent discovery is to simplify more and more into
modes of one force; or finally into mere motion, communicable in various
states, but not destructible. We will assume that science has done its
utmost; and that every chemical or animal force is demonstrably
resolvable into heat or motion, reciprocally changing into each other.
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