Having now outlined the results of our study into the mechanism of the living machine, we turn our attention next to the more difficult problem of the method by which this machine was built.  From the facts which we have been considering in the last two chapters it is evident that the problem we have before us is a mechanical rather than a chemical one.  Of course, chemical forces lie at the bottom of vital activity, and we must look upon the force of chemical affinity as the fundamental power to which the problems must be referred.  But a chemical explanation will evidently not suffice for our purpose; for we have absolutely no reason for believing that the phenomena of life can occur as the results of the chemical properties of any compound, however complex.  The simplest known form of matter which manifests life is a machine, and the problem of the origin of life must be of the origin of that machine.  Are there any forces in nature which are of a sort as to enable us to use them to explain the building of machines?  Plants and animals are the only machines which nature has produced.  They are the only instances in nature of a structure built with its parts harmoniously adjusted to each other to the performance of certain ends.  All other machines with which we are acquainted were made by man, and in making them intelligence came in to adapt the parts to each other.  But in the living organism is a similarly adapted machine made by natural means rather than artificial.  How were they built?  Does nature, apart from human intelligence, possess forces which can achieve such results?

Here again we must attack the problem from what seems to be the wrong end.  Apparently it would be simpler to discover the method of the manufacture of the simplest machine rather than the more complex ones.  But this has proved contrary to the fact.  Perhaps the chief reason is that the simplest living machine is the cell whose study must always involve the use of the microscope, and for this reason is more difficult.  Perhaps it is because the problem is really a more difficult one than to explain the building of the more complex machines out of the simpler ones.  At all events, the last fifty years have told us much of the method of the building of the complex machines out of the simpler ones, while we have as yet not even a hint as to the solution of the building of the simplest machine from the inanimate world.  Our attention must, therefore, be first directed to the method by which nature has constructed the complex machines which we find filling the world to-day in the form of animals and plants.