354 THE FIRST ORGANISMS 



and groups of processes were of a negative character, they 

 were inimical to the particular individual formation, leading 

 to its dissolution, to the disappearance of the drop in which 

 they arose. 



However, such coacervate systems cannot have played any 

 essential part in the further evolution of organic formations 

 as their individual history was short and quickly brought to 

 a close. The only systems which maintained themselves in 

 existence for a more or less prolonged period under the 

 conditions prevailing in the external medium were those 

 which had an individual organisation based on chemical 

 reactions which were favourable for their existence. 



Thus, even at this stage of the evolution of matter there 

 appeared a certain * selection ' of organised colloidal systems 

 on the basis of the suitability of their organisation to the 

 function of preserving the uninterrupted interaction of the 

 system and the surrounding medium under given circum- 

 stances. This ' selection ' was, of course, of a very primitive 

 kind and not directly to be compared with fully developed 

 * natural selection ' in the strictly biological sense of the 

 term. Nevertheless the further evolution of organic systems 

 was controlled by ' selection ' of this sort and thus acquired 

 a definite direction. 



Processes of self -renewal of the systems. 



In the first place this directed evolution led to an essential 

 alteration in the character of the stability of the original 

 colloidal systems. The stability of the coacervate drops which 

 first arose in the waters of the hydrosphere may originally 

 have been governed by the same static principles which 

 govern the stability of coacervates of gelatin and gum arabic 

 produced artificially in the laboratory. 



The coacervate state and the organisation of the processes 

 taking place within the drop may, to some extent, exist 

 independently of one another. However, for reasons which 

 have already been indicated, during the course of directed 

 evolution these two aspects of the organisation must after- 

 wards have become more and more unified within the single 

 system, because the existence of the system depended on a 



