The architect of the new school is Mr. Denfer.
[NATURE.]
RESEARCHES ON THE ORIGIN AND LIFE-HISTORIES OF THE LEAST AND LOWEST LIVING THINGS.
By Rev. W.H. DALLINGER, LL. D.
To all who have familiarized themselves, even cursorily, with modern scientific knowledge, it is well known that the mind encounters the infinite in the contemplation of minute as well as in the study of vast natural phenomena. The farthest limit we have reached, with the most gigantic standard of measurement we could well employ, in gauging the greatness of the universe, only leaves us with an overwhelming consciousness of the awful greatness—the abyss of the infinite—that lies beyond, and which our minds can never measure. The indefinite has a limit somewhere; but it is not the indefinite, it is the measureless, the infinite, that vast extension forces upon our minds. In like manner, the immeasurable in minuteness is an inevitable mental sequence from the facts and phenomena revealed to us by a study of the minute in nature. The practical divisibility of matter disclosed by modern physics may well arrest and astonish us. But biology, the science which investigates the phenomena of all living things, is in this matter no whit behind. The most universally diffused organism in nature, the least in size with which we are definitely acquainted, is so small that fifty millions of them could lie together in the one-hundredth of an inch square. Yet these definite living things have the power of locomotion, of ingestion, of assimilation, of excretion, and of enormous multiplication, and the material of which the inconceivably minute living speck is made is a highly complex chemical compound. We dare not attempt a conception of the minuteness of the ultimate atoms that compose the several simple elements that thus mysteriously combine to form the complex substance and properties of this least and lowliest living thing. But if we could even measure these, as a mental necessity, we are urged indefinitely on to a minuteness without conceivable limit, in effect, a minuteness that is beyond all finite measure or conception. So that, as modern physics and optics have enabled us not to conceive merely, but to actually realize, the vastness of spatial extension, side by side with subtile tenuity and extreme divisibility of matter, so the labor, enthusiasm, and perseverance of thirty years, stimulated by the insight of a rare and master mind, and aided by lenses of steadily advancing perfection, have enabled the student of life-forms not simply to become possessed of an inconceivably broader, deeper, and truer knowledge of the great world of visible life, of which he himself is a factor, but also to open up and penetrate into a world of minute living things so ultimately little that we cannot adequately conceive them, which are, nevertheless, perfect in their adaptations and wonderful in their histories. These organisms, while they are the least, are also the lowliest in nature, and are to our present capacity totally devoid of what is known as organic structure, even when scrutinized with our most powerful and perfect lenses. Now these organisms lie on the very verge and margin of the vast area of what we know as living. They possess the essential properties of life, but in their most initial state. And their numberless billions, springing every moment into existence wherever putrescence appeared, led to the question, How do they originate? Do they spring up de novo from the highest point on the area of not-life, which they touch? Are they, in short, the direct product of some yet uncorrelated force in nature, changing the dead, the unorganized, the not-living, into definite forms of life? Now this is a profound question, and that it is a difficult one there can be no doubt. But that it is a question for our laboratories is certain. And after careful and prolonged experiment and research the legitimate question to be asked is, Do we find that, in our laboratories and in the observed processes of nature now, the not-living can be, without the intervention of living things, changed into that which lives?
To that question the vast majority of practical biologists answer without hesitancy, No, we have no facts to justify such a conclusion. Prof. Huxley shall represent them. He says: "The properties of living matter distinguish it absolutely from all other kinds of things;" and, he continues, "the present state of our knowledge furnishes us with no link between the living and the not-living." Now let us carefully remember that the great doctrine of Charles Darwin has furnished biology with a magnificent generalization; one indeed which stands upon so broad a basis that great masses of detail and many needful interlocking facts are, of necessity, relegated to the quiet workers of the present and the earnest laborers of the years to come. But it is a doctrine which cannot be shaken. The constant and universal action of variation, the struggle for existence, and the "survival of the fittest," few who are competent to grasp will have the temerity to doubt. And to many, that lies within it as a doctrine, and forms the fibre of its fabric, is the existence of a continuity, an unbroken stream of unity running from the base to the apex of the entire organic series. The plant and the animal, the lowliest organized and the most complex, the minutest and the largest, are related to each other so as to constitute one majestic organic whole. Now to this splendid continuity practical biology presents no adverse fact. All our most recent and most accurate knowledge confirms it. But the question is, Does this continuity terminate now in the living series, and is there then a break—a sharp, clear discontinuity, and beyond, another realm immeasurably less endowed, known as the realm of not-life? or Does what has been taken for the clear-cut boundary of the vital area, when more deeply searched, reveal the presence of a force at present unknown, which changes not-living into the living, and thus makes all nature an unbroken sequence and a continuous whole? That this is a great question, a question involving large issues, will be seen by all who have familiarized themselves with the thought and fact of our times. But we must treat it purely as a question of science; it is not a question of how life first appeared upon the earth, it is only a question of whether there is any natural force now at work building not-living matter into living forms. Nor have we to determine whether or not, in the indefinite past, the not-vital elements on the earth, at some point of their highest activity, were endowed with, or became possessed of, the properties of life.
Fig. 1