144 THE CASE AGAINST EVOLUTION 



cell, both in its chemical composition and in its morphologi- 

 cal structure, is an organism of extraordinary complexity. 

 The protoplasm that it incloses is a mixture of very diverse 

 substances. But if there be set aside on the one hand those 

 substances which are in the process of assimilation and on 

 the other those which are the by-products of nutrition, and 

 which are in the process of elimination, there remain the 

 protein or albuminous substances, and these must be con- 

 sidered, if not the essential factor of life, at least the theater 

 of its manifestations. . . . Chemistry, however, is totally 

 ignorant, or nearly so, of the constitution of living albumen, 

 for chemical methods of investigation at the very outset kill 

 the living cell. The slightest rise in temperature, contact 

 with the solvent, the very powerful effect of even the mildest 

 reactions cause the transformation that needs to be pre- 

 vented, and the chemist has nothing left but dead albumen." 

 (Smithson. Inst. Rpt. for 1916, pp. 208, 209.) 



Chemical analysis associated with physical analysis by 

 means of the polariscope, spectroscope, x-rays, ultramicro- 

 scope, etc. is extremely useful in determining the structure 

 of inorganic units like the atom and the molecule. Both, 

 too, throw valuable light on the problem of the structure of 

 non-living multimolecules such as the crystal units of crystal- 

 loids and the ultramicrons of colloids, but they furnish no 

 clue to the submicroscopical morphology of the living cell. 

 Such methods do not enable us to examine anything more 

 than the "physical substrate" of life, and that, only after it 

 has been radically altered; for it is not the same after life 

 has flown. At all events, the integrating principle, the forma- 

 tive determinant, which binds the components of living pro- 

 toplasm into a unitary system, which makes of them a single 

 totality instead of a mere sum or fortuitous aggregate of 

 disparate and uncoordinated factors, and which gives to 

 them a determinate and persistent specificity that can hold 

 its own amid a perpetual fluxion of matter and continual flow 

 of energy, this is forever inaccessible to the chemist, and con- 



