TWENTIETH CENTURY SCIENCE PROBLEMS. 245 



tion has come about and that the question has been rim down to cellular 

 structure and molecular arrangement. It will hardly be gainsaid that 

 a knowledge of the proper conditions for changing forms, functions, 

 habits and motives of living beings will be of priceless value to the race, 

 and this work comes to the twentieth century. 



Another piece of work, bringing great surprise among biologists 

 as well as the rest of the thinking world, has been given to us within 

 a year or two, namely, that unfertilized eggs have been made to de- 

 velop in a normal way by subjecting them to certain inorganic chem- 

 ical substances, such as magnesium chloride. It has been repeated by 

 so many there is no doubt about it now, but its significance is that life 

 itself is a chemical process and does not necessarily depend upon ante- 

 cedent life any further than such structure contains chemical combina- 

 tions of proper sort, and that if these be provided in other ways life 

 and growth will result. This research has no more than begun and we 

 may be on the lookout for surprises. A French biologist reports that 

 if an egg be properly cut into as many as sixteen pieces it will develop 

 into sixteen individuals, differing only in size from the normal indi- 

 vidual. This opens out a new field, the philosophical importance of 

 which exceeds its biological importance, as can be seen in a minute's 

 thinking. AVhat the outcome will be no one can tell now, but we may 

 envy the biologists who devote their time to such investigations. 



A few years ago two German scientific men discovered that a 

 minute drop of a mixture of oil and a salt of potash acted like a 

 microscopic living thing in several ways. It would move about spon- 

 taneously, change its form, had a circulation in itself, would gather 

 to itself particles of other matter in its neighborhood, and was sensi- 

 tive to stimulus from the outside. It comported itself like a thing 

 of life in all ways but one, it could not reproduce its like. The ma- 

 terial itself was called artificial protoplasm. The work is still being 

 investigated, both abroad and at home, with the hypothesis that if 

 the proper chemical constituents can be found and added it will then 

 be a real artificial living thing. As it already possesses four of the 

 five distinguishing characteristics of a living thing, ingenuity and 

 persistence will enable some one to find and endow it with the fifth. 

 It will not be safe for one to predict that this can not be done, for it may 

 be done to-morrow, and the twentieth century starts with a pretty prob- 

 lem considered as a physico-chemical problem but the one who solves it, 

 if it should be done, will have reason to be thankful he is not living 

 in any preceding century, for his life would be made a burden to him, 

 if he was not made a martyr. 



I have been told by many good people that this question or that 

 question was quite outside of the domain of science and presumptuous 

 in one to inquire into. Astronomy and geology and chemistry are 

 graciously permitted to be in the hands of the man of science, but life 



