PANSPERMIA 57 



would then certainly be on the surface of the meteorites and 

 would therefore necessarily be destroyed in transit through 

 the Earth's atmosphere. 



A very bold and original hypothesis has fairly recently 

 been put forward by L. Berg."* It is directly connected with 

 the meteoritic theory of the transport of life. Berg bases his 

 hypothesis on O. Shmidt's meteoritic theory of the formation 

 of the Earth. ^^ According to this theory, the Earth was never 

 an incandescent sphere but consisted of cold materials from 

 the beginning. "Along with the aggiegation of meteorites 

 of which it is formed ", Berg wrote, " the Earth may also have 

 acquired the germs of life or perhaps ready-made complex 

 living organisms." 



This hypothesis, however, agrees so badly with the facts 

 so far studied that it is hard to point to a single fact which 

 might support it. On the contrary, all that we know about 

 meteorites and cosmic dust is totally opposed to it. 



Summing up all that has been said, we must admit that 

 the theory of cosmozoe or lithopanspermia, the theory that 

 life arrived on Earth inside meteorites, is in direct contradic- 

 tion to the objective facts of contemporary science. 



Arrhenius' theory of panspermia. 



The theory of radiopanspermia was produced at the begin- 

 ning of the twentieth century to replace that of litho- 

 panspermia. The originator of this theory was the famous 

 Swedish physical chemist S. Arrhenius,^" who was an ardent 

 supporter of the idea that life is distributed throughout 

 space. He tried to prove by direct calculations that it is 

 possible for particles of matter to pass from one heavenly 

 body to another. He considered that the main agent in this 

 case would be the pressure of the rays of light. 



The phenomenon received its theoretical foundation at 

 the hands of Clerk Maxwell in the second half of the nine- 

 teenth century, but the scientists of that time refused to 

 accept it without direct experimental evidence. Only a bril- 

 liant experimentalist like the Russian physicist P. Lebedev^^ 

 could succeed in demonstrating the phenomenon, which he 

 did in 1900. By direct experiment Lebedev showed that 



