SPECULATIONS ON THE ORIGIN OF LIFE 305 



appears to consist of little or nothing more than chromatin, as 

 for example the spirochetes (treponemes) parasitic in blood, 

 the male gametes of the malarial parasites, etc. It may be 

 urged against this statement that in such minute organisms 

 microscopic technique fails to reveal all details of structure and 

 that cytoplasmic elements may be present though invisible; 

 but at least this much can be said, that the more minute the 

 organism, the less evident, as a rule, is the presence of cyto- 

 plasmic structures, until in the very smallest the body appears 

 to consist mainly or even entirely of chromatin. 



For these various reasons, I am unable to share the view 

 that the cytoplasmic substance of the cell is to be regarded as 

 the primum vivens of which the chromatin and the nucleus are 

 a secondary elaboration. 1 Rightly or wrongly, I have been 



1 The conclusion that the chromatin represents the primary living substance 

 of the protoplasm is one that has been reached by me mainly upon morphological 

 grounds ; it stands, therefore, urgently in need of support from other methods of 

 approaching the question and especially from the chemical side. In this con- 

 nexion, I may quote from a letter of the date August 17, 191 2, written to me by a 

 friend whom I know as yet only by correspondence, Dr. R. G. Eccles, of New 

 York, who makes some suggestions which I am not competent to criticise but 

 which seem to me extremely pertinent to the matter under consideration. Dr. 

 Eccles writes : 



" If some of your biochemist friends could be induced to present Kossel's ideas 

 of the protamines in connexion with your paper it seems to me it would strengthen 

 your position. The protamines are the proteins most common in spermatozoa. 

 Chittenden refers to Kossel's views thus : ' The basic protamines are undoubtedly 

 the simplest and lowest in the scale and it is quite probable, as suggested by 

 Kossel, that these substances constitute the nuclei of all proteins ' {Pop. Set. 

 Monthly, December 1904, p. 157). On the same subject Mann tells us that ' Tha 

 radicles of which protamines are built up may be as numerous as they are in othei 

 albumins but there is less variety and each kind is repeated with great regularity 

 in the different protamines. Kossel believes the protamines to be the simplest 

 albumins' (Chcm. of the Proteids, p. 420). 



"All proteins (albumins) are built out of amino-acids just as houses are built 

 of bricks or stones. There is one amino-acid, arginine, that constitutes 80 per 

 cent, of the protamine, salmine, from the spermatozoa of the salmon. Arginine 

 is the only amino-acid found in all proteins (albumins) (Chem. of Proteids, p. 154). 

 It is the maximum constituent of the proteins of the nucleus and the minimum 

 constituent of the proteins of the cytoplasm. There are three amino-acids — 

 tyrosine, phenylamine and tryptophane— that reach their maximum in the 

 cytoplasm and their minimum in the nucleus. Some protamines seem to contain 

 none. Arginine belongs to the uncomplicated chain-series of carbon compounds 

 (aliphatic), whist the other three belong to the complex ring-series of carbon 

 compounds (aromatic). The aliphatic chains ate the very simplest of carbon 

 compounds. The aromatic rings are complex and are only conceivable, genetically, 

 as arising from the aliphatic chains. It is thus seen that (1) the protein-molecules 



