Publisher's Synopsis
When for the third or fourth time during the spring or summer I take my hoe and go out and cutoff the heads of the lusty burdocks that send out their broad leaves along the edge of my garden orlawn, I often ask myself, "What is this thing that is so hard to scotch here in the grass?" I decapitateit time after time and yet it forthwith gets itself another head. We call it burdock, but what isburdock, and why does it not change into yellow dock, or into a cabbage? What is it that is soconstant and so irrepressible, and before the summer is ended will be lying in wait here with its tenthousand little hooks to attach itself to every skirt or bushy tail or furry or woolly coat that comesalong, in order to get free transportation to other lawns and gardens, to green fields and pasturesnew?It is some living thing; but what is a living thing, and how does it differ from a mechanical andnon-living thing? If I smash or overturn the sundial with my hoe, or break the hoe itself, thesethings stay smashed and broken, but the burdock mends itself, renews itself, and, if I am not on myguard, will surreptitiously mature some of the burs before the season is passed.Evidently a living thing is radically different from a mechanical thing; yet modern physical sciencetells me that the burdock is only another kind of machine, and manifests nothing but the activity ofthe mechanical and chemical principles that we see in operation all about us in dead matter; and thata little different mechanical arrangement of its ultimate atoms would turn it into a yellow dock orinto a cabbage, into an oak or into a pine, into an ox or into a man.I see that it is a machine in this respect, that it is set going by a force exterior to itself-thewarmth of the sun acting upon it, and upon the moisture in the soil; but it is unmechanical in that itrepairs itself and grows and reproduces itself, and after it has ceased running can never be made torun again. After I have reduced all its activities to mechanical and chemical principles, my mindseems to see something that chemistry and mechanics do not explain-something that avails itselfof these forces, but is not of them.
