382 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



we possessed the keys of life and form, would be a task of the 

 greatest magnitude. For each stage of development, a fresh 

 synthesis might be needed, unless indeed the faculty of repro- 

 duction were acquired by the synthetic organisms and it were 

 found possible to make use of it in such a way and on such 

 a scale as to curtail enormously the stages used by nature in 

 the process of evolution and thus to pass from form to form. 

 We should then know whether one original protoplasmic 

 substance or combination of substances possessed the repro- 

 ductive quality potentially or whether that quality belonged 

 to a plurality of such substances. This, however, is but 

 speculation. 



Whatever it may have been at its origin, the experiments of 

 Davenport and others have shown that protoplasm of different 

 organisms now varies in character, not only from species to 

 species but even in the same species according to locality, since 

 different chemical agents act differently upon it. There is a 

 probability, therefore, that if reproductive life were formed in the 

 laboratory it would not proceed from one chemical formula but 

 from many. If germination from the inorganic really happened 

 at an early stage of the world's history, it is difficult to deny that 

 the chemistry of the earth's crust, varying from place to place 

 according to geological formation and to thermal and other 

 conditions, must have produced protoplasmic substances of 

 different constituents with different morphogenetic characters 

 and limitations. As Duclaux has pointed out, however, a micro- 

 organism formed by chemical synthesis as now practised can 

 only disappear, eventually, because in every chemical interaction, 

 properly understood, the interacting bodies are destroyed to 

 form new combinations or if the organism did not disappear, as 

 it would not if the new combinations were insoluble, it would 

 reach a static condition as soon as action was complete. So that 

 if the inorganic originally became germinative it would seem 

 that it must have been endowed with an attribute of continuity 

 which it is not now known to possess. But leaving that aside, it 

 appears probable, for the reasons given above, that if life sprang 

 from the earth's material, it must have sprung from that material 

 in a plurality of forms, from each of which reproduction took 

 place and ultimately what is known as variation. Under this 

 hypothesis the forms of life now extant which vary so greatly 

 according to latitude would have been derived, not each from a 



