THE ORIGIN OF LIFE 165 



§ 5. A "New" Theory of Abiogenesis 



Since true science is out of sympathy with baseless conjec- 

 tures and gratuitous assumptions, one would scarcely expect to 

 find scientists opposing the inductive trend of the known 

 facts by preferring mere possibilities (if they are even such) to 

 solid actualities. As a matter of fact, however, there are not 

 a few who obstinately refuse to abandon preconceptions for 

 which they can find no factual justification. The bio-chemist, 

 Benjamin Moore, while conceding the bankruptcy of the old 

 theory of spontaneous generation, which looked for a de novo 

 origin of living cells in sterilized cultures, has, nevertheless, 

 the hardihood to propose what he is pleased to term a new one. 

 Impressed by the credulity of Charlton Bastian and the auto- 

 cratic tone of Schafer, he sets out to defend as plausible the 

 hypothesis that the origination of life from inert matter may 

 be a contemporaneous, perhaps, daily, phenomenon, going 

 on continually, but invisible to us, because its initial stages 

 take place in the submicroscopic world. By the time life has 

 emerged into the visible world, it has already reached the 

 stage at which the law of genetic continuity prevails, but at 

 stages of organization, which lie below the limit of the micro- 

 scope, it is not impossible, he thinks, that abiogenesis may oc- 

 cur. To plausibleize this conjecture, he notes that the cell is 

 a natural unit composed of molecules as a molecule is a natural 

 unit composed of atoms. He further notes, that, in addition to 

 the cell, there is in nature another unit higher than the mono- 

 molecule, namely, the multimolecule occurring in both crystal- 

 loids and colloids. The monomolecule consists of atoms held 

 together by atomic valence, whereas the multimolecule con- 

 sists of molecules whose atomic valence is completely sat- 

 urated, and which are, consequently, held together by what 

 is now known as molecular or residual valence. Moore cites 

 the crystal units of sodium bromide and sodium iodide as in- 

 stances of multimolecules. The crystal unit of ordinary salt, 

 sodium chloride, is an ordinary monomolecule, with the for- 



