COLLOIDS AN D LIFE 66 



not enter into the question of the initiation of the 

 process, which necessarily became more and more 

 complex with suflScient time — the years, of which 

 Suess remarks, *'Wliat are a few thousand years in 

 the course of planetary events?"^ 



But merely to remember Huxley's "Bathybius 

 Haeckeli" saves any one today from calling certain 

 precipitates primitive organisms because they look 

 like organisms, and from investing the colloids of 

 the lifeless earth with the attributes of organisms. 

 As Arthur Isaac Kendall, of the Northwestern Uni- 

 versity Medical School, observes: "Between the 

 lifeless colloid and lowliest known living things there 

 is a mental barrier."^ 



Many are convinced that there is an actual barrier 

 between non-life and life that cannot be bridged 

 except by means of an outside agency. Thus Svante 

 Arrhenius, whose place in the history of science is 

 secure because of his brilliant work on electrolytic 

 dissociation, especially espoused the ancient idea 

 of panspermia to account for the origin of life on 

 the earth. Some believe that, as Kendall holds, *'it 

 is not beyond the bounds of reason to look confi- 

 dently to a day when science will triumph once 

 again, and produce a colloid matrix in which chemi- 

 cal families are enmeshed." 



^ The Face of the Earth, II, 555. 



' "Bacteria as Colloids." Colloid Symposium Monographs, II, 195. 



