LIFE CONSTANTLY ORIGINATED BY NATURE'S PRODUCTIVE ENERGY
This quest having failed—although it had taught much by the way—the chemists, who had been making marvelous discoveries in the inorganic lifeless half of nature, undertook a far more serious exploration of the organic living half. You have interpreted very fully, they told the naturalists, the forms, and structure, and functions of organisms, but can get no further; now let us chemists try whether we cannot find the principle of life by analyzing the substance of living things.
Profiting by their experience, they turned to the colloids in hope of a clue. A colloid is a substance that shows no power of crystallization, and is composed of molecules united by their own affinity, and not by atomic affinity. They have a gelatinlike nature or composition, although varying greatly in chemical composition and general character. They differ widely in stability, for instance, some being easily upset by a change in conditions; and this peculiarity is of great importance in relation to the phenomena of life, for colloids enter largely into the composition of all living bodies, but always in a delicately balanced union with crystalloids. "The colloid is in fact," declared Thomas Graham, who first investigated its properties, "a dynamical state of matter; the crystalloid being the statical condition. The colloid possesses Energia. It may be looked upon as the probable primary source of the force appearing in the phenomena of vitality."
Now, many of the properties of inorganic colloids approximate those found in living structures, which appear to be "alive" by reason of the conversion of the energy of the sunlight into the chemical energy of their constituent (organic) colloids. The agent in this conversion is the green substance chlorophyll in the cell or cells of the plant; and, directly or indirectly, all the energy in living things arises from this one source, transmuted by this one transformer. Yet chlorophyll is far too complex a substance to arise as a first step from inorganic matter, even where conditions are suitable for life to appear; and the spontaneous production of such a thing as a bacterium would not solve the problem, for the new-born cell would have no organic food, and must at once perish. In an utterly lifeless planet inorganic colloids must first develop, and in time one of these must begin to evolve not a living cell, or anything so complex as a bacillus, but something in the way of a molecule holding a higher store of chemical energy than anything before it. Later such colloids, perhaps uniting with others, would begin to condense and form more complex organic molecules, and finally effect unions with crystalloids. Thus would organic complexity gradually be led up to, chlorophyll brought into being, and life appear. One of the foremost of the biochemists, Prof. Benjamin Moore, of the University of Liverpool, has summed this up picturesquely:
"It was no fortuitous combination of chances, and no cosmic dust, which brought life to the womb of our ancient Mother Earth in the far-distant Paleozoic ages, but a well-regulated orderly development, which comes to every mother earth in the universe in the maturity of her creation when the conditions arrive within the suitable limits. Given the presence of matter and energy forms under the proper conditions, life must come inevitably.... If this view be the true one, there must exist a whole world of living creatures which the microscope has never shown us, leading up to bacteria and the protozoa. The brink of life lies ... away down among the colloids, and the beginning of life was not a fortuitous event occurring millions of years ago and never again repeated, but one which in its primordial stages keeps on repeating itself all the time and in our generation. So that, if all intelligent creatures were by some holocaust destroyed, up out of the depths in process of millions of years intelligent beings would once more emerge."
That is to say, life arose through a recombination of forces preexisting in the cosmos, and the fact was but a step in the evolutionary process. "Such evolution," the American biologist, Henry Fairfield Osborn, declares with emphasis, "is essentially constructive, and ... is continually giving birth to an infinite variety of new forms and functions which never appeared in the universe before. It is a continuous creation or creative evolution. Although this creative power is something new derived from the old, it presents the first of the numerous contrasts between the living and the lifeless world."