The secret of life, therefore, cannot be stated in terms of chemistry, because we cannot surprise the secret of its chemical synthesis. Even if we could do this we should still be unable to say why certain syntheses should appear in living matter and resolve themselves into others at death.
We find, however, in the investigation of organic tissue (plant or animal) by such means as are available, that one substance is common to all the organic and is never found (as such) in the inorganic world. This is called Proteid. It is composed of five elements—Carbon, Hydrogen, Sulphur, Nitrogen, and Oxygen, which are combined in proportions not at present ascertained. Subject to the limitations just set forth we may say that proteid is the essential stuff of organic tissue. The two other usual (though not, like proteid, universal) constituents of this tissue—the Carbohydrates (sugar, starch, etc.) and the Fats—are, it is believed, formed partly from the products of the metabolism of proteid.
When we come to deal with the essential Structure of life we are in much the same difficulty as that in which we found ourselves in investigating its chemical Substance. We can observe living cells under the microscope, but the most powerful microscope has never reached the limits beyond which we can say that there is no structure. There is another limitation too. The microscope has revealed the fact that all living tissue is made up of cells, but the internal structure of the cell, beyond the fact that it is composed of a fluid substance within which a darker coloured nucleus is usually embedded, could not be ascertained until the recent device of staining the object with aniline dyes had been thought of. Different substances in the cell are found to take these dyes differently, and thus a world of structure of the most singular kind has been revealed in what formerly seemed a simple, semi-transparent fluid. Some parts of this structure hover, as it were, upon the very edge of perceptibility, the most suitable dyes for bringing them under observation not having been as yet discovered. There may be others which no dye can reveal, but which are yet active and necessary parts of the organism. Moreover, here too the cell is killed by the means taken to observe it, and the processes in which its structure is engaged can only as a rule be deduced from the observation of a great number of cells in which their internal movements are arrested at different stages of completion.
It has been practically demonstrated that all organic life must be at least duplex if not multiplex in its constituent elements. In its simplest known form it consists of Protoplasm and Nucleus. We know that the carrying-on of all vital functions depends on peculiar relations existing between these two elements, but what these relations exactly are is still quite obscure. Both protoplasm and nucleus are compounds of proteid with other chemical substances not yet fully determined. Protoplasm is a fluid, and has been shown by the epoch-making observations of Bütschli[25] to have a structure resembling that of an exceedingly minute foam. The nucleus usually exists in the form of a single definite body, but it may be scattered through the protoplasm of the organism in little granules. In the lowliest of organisms, the Amœbæ, we have simply a speck of protoplasm containing a nucleus, but with no surrounding wall of the harder substance which protoplasm builds up for itself in the cells belonging to higher forms of life. Such amœboid forms are the white corpuscles in the human blood, whose slow changes of form we can observe under the microscope, and which play so important a part in our economy by feeding on the noxious bacteria which produce the various forms of blood-poisoning and zymotic disease.
A more detailed account of the functions and structure of the cell must be reserved for the next chapter. In considering these and all other phenomena of vitality let me again recall the warning expressed in the taunt of Mephistopheles to the young student: the lines are as true to-day as they were when Goethe wrote them over a hundred years ago:—
“If some living thing you would learn about,
You begin by driving its Spirit out;
There lie the parts of it, one by one,
But the binding Spirit, alas, is gone!”