UIHistories Project: A History of the University of Illinois by Kalev Leetaru
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Repository: UIHistories Project: Board of Trustees Minutes - 1882 [PAGE 115]

Caption: Board of Trustees Minutes - 1882
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109 pure water and to these alone whatever the temperature, dead fish and flesh will not become ill scented or putrid, that milk and blood will not change from the condition they have when drawn from the living animal, that a heap of green or wet grass will not heat and rot, that moist wood will remain as durable as granite, and that the substances of their own bodies after life has departed are as incorruptible as gold,—these words may seem foolishness and upon the face of them absurd; yet this is the teaching of science and is the unavoidable conclusion from many instructive experiments. When the whole facts are known, the wonder is rather that the flesh of slaughtered animals so surely putrifies with us, not that as a rule fresh meat exposed to the pure air of the western plains should remain forever good. These facts could never have been known without the aid of the microscope, and since this wonderful instrument is of modern invention the knowledge set forth in the following pages has been gained alone by modern investigation. If there is still doubt about the matter as a general phenomenon, it is only because new ideas are slowly accepted; if there is dispute among the informed as to details of the process, it is mostly because so few really competent experimenters have yet undertaken the delicate but fruitful work. The marvellous progress of modern science is based on the wellgrounded idea that every effect has an adequate cause, and that these causes, in the material world at least, are subject to undeviating law. If a body moves, the force is sought, and usually not in vain, which produced the motion. If change occurs, a competent agent is at once supposed to be instrumental in its accomplishment. Students of nature are not content with passing anything" as mysterious which can be brought within the domain of knowledge, nor with accepting as a fact anything which does not fall within the reign of natural cause. Possessed of this spirit, and provided with the necessary instruments and means, the subject before us could not escape investigation by the quickened intellects of recent times. The result is, after much conflict of opinion and difference of interpretation, the established fact, that the natural changes taking place in non-living organic matter, are all due to the vital activity of living things. Some of the usual results of life-forces may be accomplished in the chemist's laboratory, but the processes and conditions there and in nature are entirely different. What life, is, and to what its particular powers are due, we do not know; but we do know its effects, and these are as pronounced and unique in the natural destruction as they are in the original upbuilding of organic matter. Life manufactures, and life in turn pulls to pieces and destroys. An organic body is not a watch, which, having been wound up, runs down of itself; but it is a splendid temple, the rich material of which, accumulated from all lands, would require the same as its original freighting for its redistribution. But the low, microscopic organisms are by no means alone, if they act in any sense different from other vitalized beings, in the work of destruction. Every living creature is continually destroying itself, reducing, through its physiological and normal processes, the solid, parts to liquids and gases, from the organic to the inorganic. This is the waste which all plants and animals suffer as long as life continues.