2 THE ORIGIN OF LIFE 



they are content to suppose that at some time after 

 the fiery heat of the crust of our globe had suf- 

 ficiently cooled to permit of the deposition of 

 water upon its surface, there must have been a 

 further continuance of the physico-chemical pro- 

 cesses that had gradually led to the evolution of all 

 the inorganic elements and their compounds from 

 the primal stuff of which the parent-nebula of our 

 solar system was composed. 



These further physico-chemical processes, whose 

 real nature is unknown, even though their result 

 was the production of what we now know as ' ' liv- 

 ing matter," with all its marvellous qualities and 

 potentialities, could only be regarded as the forg- 

 ing of other and more complicated links in the 

 chain of synthetic processes by which it had been 

 preceded. 



This must be said, although it is true that with 

 the birth of living matter there is, of course, the 

 origin of what we know as ' Life." But what 

 is ' Life "? From the scientific point of view life 

 is no entity it is only the summation and aggre- 

 gated result of all the properties of living matter. 

 This sum-total of properties and potentialities 

 must vary for every particular living thing, in 

 accordance with its complicacy of structure and 



