260 WHAT 18 LIFE 



and second German edition 1919) as pioneer effort. 

 Wolfgang Ostwald, in the volume which embodies his 

 lectures delivered in 1913 and 1914 before some of the 

 leading universities in the United States, calls colloids 

 "the world of neglected dimensions," and insists that 

 "just as normal causal biology must be edited — must 

 be rewritten in fact — in the terms of colloid chem- 

 istry, even so must pathology be rewritten."^ Ost- 

 wald indeed called colloid chemistry "the promised 

 land of the biological scientist." 



It is well known that the employment of physico- 

 chemical methods, especially in the hands of Jacques 

 Loeb, was crowned with brilliant results. The 

 successful substitution of physicochemical means for 

 the life-activity of the spermatozoon of certain 

 organisms, the work of Jacques Loeb on artificial 

 parthenogenesis (mentioned repeatedly), has been 

 the decisive factor in working a revolution of con- 

 ceptions about life which stands out as the most 

 conspicuous thing in biology since the discovery of 

 the cell. Concerning these experiments, Loeb himself 

 said: "I consider the chief value of the experiments 

 on artificial parthenogenesis to be the fact that they 

 transfer the problem of fertilization from the realm 

 of morphology into the realm of physical chem- 

 istry."* 



' Theoretical and Applied Colloid Chemistry, 171. 



* The Mechanistic Conception of Life, 123. 



