88 life's beginning on the earth 



It seems doubtful that, on any other planet circling any 

 of those forty billion suns, the train of events of evolution 

 has been duplicated in exactly the same manner as on the 

 earth. Consequently the lines of development of plants 

 and animals must have taken different courses. If nature 

 has evolved some other living being, with a developed brain, 

 this living being need not necessarily resemble man. 



SUMMARY 



The great problems here discussed have at all times been 

 the cynosure of human interest. Yet no solution has been 

 found for them. During the ages many a man's brain has 

 worn itself out in useless pondering over mankind's most 

 bewildering question, "what is life and where did it come 

 from?" 



Now it seems that we may at least look forward to a 

 future possibility of solving the problem. In dim outline, 

 a new vision appears, which science reveals to those restless 

 minds who are the true pioneers of progress. Science has 

 now penetrated much farther into the realm of the lowest 

 living things, representative types of which are the filterable 

 viruses. These invisibly small creatures are about the size 

 of indivisible particles of matter, the molecules. Yet they 

 can act upon other organic matter to attack and change it, 

 the end-product of the change being the enzymes them- 

 selves. Thus a strictly chemical process leads to the mul- 

 tiplication of something which exhibits some properties of 

 living matter, yet appears also as a substance. We believe 

 that, through matter of this type, life originated on this 

 earth. Cells, even the most primitive ones, developed from 

 this material at a much later period. 



