PHYSICAL CONDITIONS AT BEGINNING OF LIFE 593 



that the active principle of the chlorophyll of the green plant 

 is magnesium (and not iron, as was long supposed), and in 

 the light of W. Lob's and Fenton's syntheses of formaldehyde, 

 we have reason to suppose that the office of the magnesium 

 is similar to that of the manganese. 



Following our conception of primeval conditions, we have 

 then merely to suppose that the colloid particles, amino acids 

 and their like, precipitated into a concentrated solution con- 

 taining metal salts like magnesium, formed with the latter 

 precisely such metallo-organic compounds as our organic 

 ferments have been shown to be. Under insolation, or at a 

 sufficient temperature and in a sufficient concentration, these 

 primitive ferments would then begin what we may perhaps 

 regard as the initial work of life, that of uniting the C or CO 

 atoms of the dissociated carbon dioxide molecule to some 

 other substance and setting oxygen free. In other words, 

 it seems probable that these nascent forms of volcanic life 

 themselves created the milieu or conditions for their own 

 further evolution. This may have been the first of those 

 seemingly marvellous " adaptations " or syndromes, with which 

 living nature is crowded, and which are in reality " adaptations" 

 only to our hopelessly myopic and strabismic anthropo- 

 morphism. 



It is to be noted that this mode of carbohydrate formation 

 may not have been the earliest of vital syntheses. There is 

 much to suggest that it was not. The simplest of plants, we 

 know, are already relatively complicated organisms. They 

 are syncitia or if we like symbioses of the more primitive 

 chloroplasts, which assimilate and divide even as does the 

 cell itself, and are therefore, in the fullest sense, alive. We 

 know of much simpler organisms, which are not plants in any 

 sense of the word. They do not contain chlorophyll, they 

 do not require sunlight, they do not assimilate carbon dioxide, 

 they do not evolve oxygen. Some of these lowly organisms 

 derive their carbon from carbonates, 1 and even from carbon 

 monoxide, 2 one of the most deadly of known gases to the 

 higher organisms. In the nitro- and nitroso-monas, the 

 principal act of " nutrition " is a reaction to ammonia and to 

 nitrous acid. 



1 Winogradsky, in Lafar. Handb. iii. 158, 1904. 

 ' Kaserer : Centr.f. B. u. P. II., Nos. 22, 23, 1906. 



