728 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



ent impossibility, are falling right and left under the strokes of sci- 

 ence, who shall say that this one, too, may not ultimately crumble 

 beneath the strenuous but reverent assault ? Whether the achieve- 

 ment is possible or impossible, however, the derivation of life from 

 not-life at some time, if not at this time, under conditions provided in 

 the laboratory of Nature herself, is certain : the fate of the hypothesis 

 is not by any means involved in that of the experiment. 



" No specimen of any kind of matter which is actually passing 

 from the non-living to the living state, or which can be shown to 

 establish any connection between these absolutely different conditions 

 of matter," Dr. Beale asserts, "has been, or can be at this time, 

 brought forward." Discounting the expression " absolutely different," 

 and noting with satisfaction the qualifying phrase " at this time," it 

 must be observed that the assertion remains, nevertheless, in some 

 degree inaccurate. Not to mention that all living matter is constituted 

 by not-living elements, there is good reason to believe that the mole- 

 cules of those colloidal compounds which together form living matter 

 are constituted by molecules of the not-living crystalloids, and it is 

 beyond dispute that the same substance, as silica, may pass, under 

 varying conditions, from the crystalloidal to the colloidal state and 

 back again, for which reasons, among others, the colloid may be pointed 

 to as a " kind of matter " which, if not " actually passing from the non- 

 living to the living state," can at least be said to " establish " some 

 "connection" between these "different conditions of matter." Be 

 this as it may, it " has been brought forward " as such, and by no less 

 honored an investigator than Professor Graham, whose discovery of 

 the law of the diffusion of gases, to say nothing of his profound re- 

 searches on the diffusion of aqueous solutions, should have made his 

 name familiar to Dr. Beale. " The colloid is in fact," says Professor 

 Graham, " a dynamical state of matter, the crystalloidal being the 

 statical condition. The colloid possesses energia. It may be looked 

 upon as the primary source of the force appearing in the phenomena 

 of vitality." Whatever Dr. Beale may think of the colloid, it serves 

 at any rate to check his broad assertion, and at the same time to indi- 

 cate how sharply experimental science is pressing upon the problem 

 of life. " At this time," however, the pregnant movement has but 

 fairly begun. 



" But the fact," Dr. Beale insists, " that this living matter, as is 

 well known, is invariably derived from matter that already lived, is a 

 serious difficulty which presents itself to the mind at the outset of the 

 inquiry." Here, again, our professor omits the important qualification 

 to which he is committed. " Living matter " is " invariably derived 

 from matter that already lived," so far as our experience goes, if we 

 leave out of the account Dr. Bastian's experiments ; but our experi- 

 ence at present, aside from those interesting but unfinished researches, 

 does not stretch away to the beginning of life, and it is unphilosoph- 



