THE ORIGIN OF LIFE 151 



to produce a colorless Protococcus, which subsequently ac- 

 quired chlorophyll and became a Protococcus viridis. "If 

 the affair is so simple," writes Delage, "why does not the 

 author produce a few specimens of this protococcus in his 

 laboratory? We will gladly supply him with the necessary 

 chlorophyll." ("La structure du protoplasma et les theories 

 sur I'heredite," p. 402.) 



Another consideration, which never appears to trouble the 

 visionaries who propound theories of this sort, is the fact 

 that the inert elements and blind forces of inorganic nature 

 are, if left to themselves, utterly impotent to duplicate even 

 so much as the feats of the chemical laboratory, to say noth- 

 ing at all of the more wonderful achievements possible only 

 to living organisms. In the laboratory, the physicochemical 

 forces of the mineral world are coordinated, regulated, and 

 directed by the guiding intelligence of the chemist. In that 

 heterogeneous conglomerate, which we call brute matter, no 

 such guiding principle exists, and the only possible automatic 

 results are those which the fortuitous concurrence of blind 

 factors avails to produce. Chance of this kind may vie with 

 art in the production of relatively simple combinations or 

 systems, but where the conditions are as complex as those, 

 which the synthesis of chlorophyll presupposes, chance is 

 impotent and regulation absolutely imperative. How much 

 more is this true, when there is question of the production 

 of an effect so complicatedly telic as the living organism I 

 "I venture to think," says Sir William Tilden, in a letter 

 to the London Times (Sept. 10, 1912), "that no chemist will 

 be prepared to suggest a process^ by which, from the inter- 

 action of such materials (viz., inorganic substances), anything 

 approaching a substance of the nature of a proteid could be 

 formed or, if by a complex series of changes a compound of 

 this kind were conceivably produced, that it would present 

 the characters of living protoplasm." In the concluding sen- 

 tence of his letter, the great chemist seems to deprecate even 

 the discussion of a chemical synthesis of living matter, whether 



