686 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



made to originate in the same manner ; that from inorganic material 

 Woehler produced urea, Strecker taurin, Kolbe acetic acid. etc. 



However, I am perfectly aware that this is not the kind of infor- 

 mation which will satisfy the somewhat unscientific but historically 

 justifiable craving for positive and circumstantial enlightenment con- 

 cerning the origin of living substance. The desire is to understand 

 the genuine organic synthesis which has legitimately led to the for- 

 mation of such peculiar compounds as now actually manifest vital phe- 

 nomena. 



With the protest, clearly defined, and well sustained in these pages, 

 that this question is not at all one of vitality, but merely one of specific 

 chemistry, I will venture a few tentative gropings. Their verification 

 would constitute not a biological but a purely chemical task. 



The transformation of the inorganic into the organic world is at 

 present, so far as we are aware, exclusively accomplished by the medi- 

 ation of protoplasm, containing that peculiar kind of coloring-matter 

 to which the greenness of vegetation is due, and which has received 

 the name of chlorophyl. This chlorophyl-tinged protoplasm is the 

 substratum in which carbonic acid is deprived of its oxygen, and or- 

 ganically incorporated. Here, and here alone, organic substance ori- 

 ginates in Nature. 1 It is the one magic gate through which the inor- 

 ganic effects its passage into the organic; the one transubstantiating 

 medium by which the death-like spell of inertness is broken and the 

 dormant energies of matter admitted to bloom forth into life. 



By what agencies is this stupendous chemical feat, this vivifying 

 transmutation, wrought ? How is so signal a synthesis of material 

 constituents dynamically incited ? If we possessed no further knowl- 

 edge concerning this initial shaping of organic compounds, it might 

 be supposed that the chlorophyl-tinged protoplasm exerted some kind 

 of catalytic influence on carbonic acid, causing by its mere presence 

 decomposition of the same, and affording thereby to the free carbon an 

 opportunity of entering into the organic nexus. But it is far other- 

 wise exceedingly more wonderful. 



Prompted by Priestley's discovery of oxygen the vivifying gas in- 

 haled by animals and exhaled by plants, and its contrast to carbonic 

 acid, the suffocating gas exhaled by animals and inhaled by plants 

 the entire scientific world, during the first decades of the present cen- 

 tury, became deeply agitated by the recognition and elucidation of 

 what was called the chemical and pl^siological balance of organic 

 Nature." 



It was taught and to the present day this teaching forms the 

 groundwork of most physiological conceptions that plants imbibe and 



1 The experimental synthesis of organic compounds, found to be accomplished, under 

 certain artificial conditions, by normally parasitic organisms, containing no chlorophyl, 

 need not be taken into consideration in the above argument, however interesting in 

 itself it may otherwise prove to be. 



