Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 158, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 15 July 1918 — WATER NECESSARY TO LIFE [ARTICLE]

WATER NECESSARY TO LIFE

All Vitality Has Been Well Called an “Aquatic Phenomenon,” as FrenchStudent Expressed It. All life is lived in water. Where no water is, no life can be. The necessary machinery may have been already made, as in a completely dried seed, but that seed eannot actually live until water reaches it again. To live is to be wet; or, in the phrase of a French student, “Life is an aquatic phenomenon.” When the supply of water is withheld from living things, they may survive, but their life is slowed down, as it were. In the completely dried seed, life is arrested altogether, yet the creature is not dead. The French call that a case of vie suspendue—or, in our language, suspended animation. After astonishingly long periods, such* seeds will germinate if they are watered. The astronomer tells us that our planet is only one of many belonging to Innumerable suns, and he wonders whether this little “lukewarm bullet” of ours is really unique in bearing a burden of life. There is one path that leads to the answer of his query. If he finds no evidence of water on other worlds, he cannot expect to find life there.