building up of new living material only in association with pre-existing living material, and the greater readiness with which certain inorganic reactions take place if there already be present some trace of the result of the reaction.
The real distinction between living matter and inorganic matter is chemical. Living substance always contains proteid, and although we know that proteid contains only common inorganic elements, we know neither how these are combined to form proteid, nor any way in which proteid can be brought into existence except in the presence of previously existing proteid. The central position of the problem of life lies in the chemistry of proteid, and until that has been fully explored, we are unable to say that there is any problem of life behind the problem of proteid.
Comparison of living and lifeless organic matter presents the initial difficulty that we cannot draw an exact line between a living and a dead organism. The higher “warm-blooded” creatures appear to present the simplest case and in their life-history there seems to be a point at which we can say “that which was alive is now dead.” We judge from some major arrest of activity, as when the heart ceases to beat. Long after this, however, various tissues remain alive and active, and the event to which we give the name of death is no more than a superficially visible stage in a series of changes. In less highly integrated organisms, such as “cold-blooded” vertebrates, the point of death is less conspicuous, and when we carry our observations further down the scale of animal life, there ceases to be any salient phase in the slow transition from life to death.
The distinction between life and death is made more difficult by a consideration of cases of so-called “arrested vitality.” If credit can be given to the stories of Indian fakirs, it appears that human beings can pass voluntarily into a state of suspended animation that may last for weeks. The state of involuntary trance, sometimes mistaken for death, is a similar occurrence. A. Leeuwenhoek, in 1719, made the remarkable discovery, since abundantly confirmed, that many animalculae, notably tardigrades and rotifers, may be completely desiccated and remain in that condition for long periods without losing the power of awaking to active life when moistened with water. W. Preyer has more recently investigated the matter and has given it the name “anabiosis.” Later observers have found similar occurrences in the cases of small nematodes, rotifers and bacteria. The capacity of plant seeds to remain dry and inactive for very long periods is still better known. It has been supposed that in the case of the plant seeds and still more in that of the animals, the condition of anabiosis was merely one in which the metabolism was too faint to be perceptible by ordinary methods of observation, but the elaborate experiments of W. Kochs would seem to show that a complete arrest of vital activity is compatible with viability. The categories, “alive” and “dead,” are not sufficiently distinct for us to add to our conception of life by comparing them. A living organism usually displays active metabolism of proteid, but the metabolism may slow down, actually cease and yet reawaken; a dead organism is one in which the metabolism has ceased and does not reawaken.
Origin of Life.—It is plain that we cannot discuss adequately the origin of life or the possibility of the artificial construction of living matter (see Abiogenesis and Biogenesis) until the chemistry of protoplasm and specially of proteid is more advanced. The investigations of O. Bütschli have shown how a model of protoplasm can be manufactured. Very finely triturated soluble particles are rubbed into a smooth paste with an oil of the requisite consistency. A fragment of such a paste brought into a liquid in which the solid particles are soluble, slowly expands into a honeycomb like foam, the walls of the minute vesicles being films of oil, and the contents being the soluble particles dissolved in droplets of the circumambient liquid. Such a model, properly constructed, that is to say, with the vesicles of the foam microscopic in size, is a marvellous imitation of the appearance of protoplasm, being distinguishable from it only by a greater symmetry. The nicely balanced conditions of solution produce a state of unstable equilibrium, with the result that internal streaming movements and changes of shape and changes of position in the model simulate closely the corresponding manifestations in real protoplasm. The model has no power of recuperation; in a comparatively short time equilibrium is restored and the resemblance with protoplasm disappears. But it suggests a method by which, when the chemistry of protoplasm and proteid is better known, the proper substances which compose protoplasm may be brought together to form a simple kind of protoplasm.
It has been suggested from time to time that conditions very unlike those now existing were necessary for the first appearance of life, and must be repeated if living matter is to be constructed artificially. No support for such a view can be derived from observations of the existing conditions of life. The chemical elements involved are abundant; the physical conditions of temperature pressure and so forth at which living matter is most active, and within the limits of which it is confined, are familiar and almost constant in the world around us. On the other hand, it may be that the initial conditions for the synthesis of proteid are different from those under which proteid and living matter display their activities. E. Pflüger has argued that the analogies between living proteid and the compounds of cyanogen are so numerous that they suggest cyanogen as the starting-point of protoplasm. Cyanogen and its compounds, so far as we know, arise only in a state of incandescent heat. Pflüger suggests that such compounds arose when the surface of the earth was incandescent, and that in the long process of cooling, compounds of cyanogen and hydrocarbons passed into living protoplasm by such processes of transformation and polymerization as are familiar in the chemical groups in question, and by the acquisition of water and oxygen. His theory is in consonance with the interpretation of the structure of protoplasm as having behind it a long historical architecture and leads to the obvious conclusion that if protoplasm be constructed artificially it will be by a series of stages and that the product will be simpler than any of the existing animals or plants.
Until greater knowledge of protoplasm and particularly of proteid has been acquired, there is no scientific room for the suggestion that there is a mysterious factor differentiating living matter from other matter and life from other activities. We have to scale the walls, open the windows, and explore the castle before crying out that it is so marvellous that it must contain ghosts.
As may be supposed, theories of the origin of life apart from doctrines of special creation or of a primitive and slow spontaneous generation are mere fantastic speculations. The most striking of these suggests an extra-terrestrial origin. H. E. Richter appears to have been the first to propound the idea that life came to this planet as cosmic dust or in meteorites thrown off from stars and planets. Towards the end of the 19th century Lord Kelvin (then Sir W. Thomson) and H. von Helmholtz independently raised and discussed the possibility of such an origin of terrestrial life, laying stress on the presence of hydrocarbons in meteoric stones and on the indications of their presence revealed by the spectra of the tails of comets. W. Preyer has criticized such views, grouping them under the phrase “theory of cosmozoa,” and has suggested that living matter preceded inorganic matter. Preyer’s view, however, enlarges the conception of life until it can be applied to the phenomena of incandescent gases and has no relation to ideas of life derived from observation of the living matter we know.
References.—O. Bütschli, Investigations on Microscopic Foams and Protoplasm (Eng. trans. by E. A. Minchin, 1894), with a useful list of references; H. von Helmholtz, Vorträge und Reden, ii. (1884); W. Kochs, Allgemeine Naturkunde, x. 673 (1890); A. Leeuwenhoek, Epistolae ad Societatem regiam Anglicam (1719); E. Pflüger, “Über einige Gesetze des Eiweissstoffwechsels,” in Archiv. Ges. Physiol. liv. 333 (1893); W. Preyer, Die Hypothesen über den Ursprung des Lebens (1880); H. E. Richter, Zur Darwinischen Lehre (1865); Herbert Spencer, Principles of Biology; Max Verworm, General Physiology (English trans. by F. S. Lee, 1899), with a very full literature. (P. C. M.)
