352 THE president's address. 



in with my views. One objection, which has been put before me 

 by my friend Dr. Chalmers Mitchell, is that in the evolution of 

 the living substance the chemically-simpler may reasonably be 

 supposed to have preceded the chemically-complex, and that if 

 chromatin is more complex than cytoplasm in its chemical con- 

 stitution, it is probable that cytoplasm was an earlier stage of 

 evolution. Now, admitting, for the sake of argument, that the 

 primary living substance has been evolved from chemically- 

 simpler substances through a series of compounds in an ascending 

 scale of chemical complexity, the question at once arises, at what 

 point in the series was a substance produced which could be 

 termed living? At the bottom of the scale are substances which 

 no one could consider living, such as water, carbon dioxide and 

 inorganic mineral salts ; at the top are the complex proteins of 

 the living substance. Are the properties of living matter the 

 result of a continuous physico-chemical evolution from the pro- 

 perties of simple inorganic compounds ? Or is life, as we know 

 it, inseparable from a certain degree of chemical complexity, and 

 if so at what point in the series did it come in ? These are 

 questions which no one can answer conclusively ; all that we can 

 say is that we know of no life that is not associated with chemical 

 substances of the utmost complexity. And we may add further 

 that it is by no means certain that life has been produced by a 

 process of chemical evolution from inorganic to organic ; a matter 

 upon which I shall have more to say presently. 



The current and orthodox biological view with regard to the 

 primary form of the living substance and of living beings 

 generally is what I may term the cytoplasmic theory, to dis- 

 tinguish it from mine, which I will call the chromatinic theory. 

 According to this view, the cytoplasm is regarded as the primary 

 living substance par excellence, of which chromatin is merely a 

 product. The earliest living things were supposed to be formless 

 masses of cytoplasm without a nucleus, Haeckel's Monera. Many 

 naturalists seem to have regarded these hypothetical primitive 

 organisms as by no means minute, not even what we should 

 consider small. Most of us remember, I think, the unfortunate 

 Bathijhius, which was supposed to consist of primordial proto- 

 plasm carpeting square miles of the ocean bed, but which turned 

 out to be a precipitate of calcium sulphate produced by adding 

 alcohol to sea water. Quite apart from a trivial error of this 



