to do work, an animal must be fed; and, even at a still earlier period, Count Rumford remarked that a ton of hay will be administered more economically by feeding a horse with it, and then getting work out of the horse, than by burning it as fuel in an engine.
225. In this chapter, the same line of thought has been carried out a little further. We have seen that life is associated with delicately-constructed machines, so that whenever a transmutation of energy is brought about by a living being, could we trace the event back, we should find that the physical antecedent was probably a much less transmutation, while again the antecedent of this would probably be found still less, and so on, as far as we could trace it.
226. But with all this, we do not pretend to have discovered the true nature of life itself, or even the true nature of its relation to the material universe.
What we have ventured is the assertion that, as far as we can judge, life is always associated with machinery of a certain kind, in virtue of which an extremely delicate directive touch is ultimately magnified into a very considerable transmutation of energy. Indeed, we can hardly imagine the freedom of motion implied in life to exist apart from machinery possessed of very great delicacy of construction.
In fine, we have not succeeded in solving the problem as to the true nature of life, but have only driven the difficulty into a borderland of thick darkness, into
