ADDENDUM 



A Survey of Oparin's book: The Origin of Life 



After the manuscript of this book had gone to press, the 

 epoch-making work of A. I. Oparin, "The Origin of Life," 

 appeared in its English translation by S. Morgulis of 

 Omaha, Nebraska, published by the Macmillan Company 

 of New York in May 1938. The publishers of this book 

 have kindly agreed with the proposition of this writer to 

 insert here a review of Oparin's work which so closely touches 

 upon the subject here discussed. 



There is a close resemblance of Oparin's views on the 

 origin of life, with those here evolved. His idea like ours 

 is that life did not arise like a spark igniting a flame, but 

 that a period of time of unimaginable length must have 

 elapsed before anything remotely resembling a real living 

 organism made its first appearance on the sterile surface 

 of this globe. Oparin elaborates this idea very clearly. In 

 an admirable historical expose, which goes as far back as 

 the ancient and medieval philosophers, he compares it with 

 the hitherto prevailing views on the origin of life. He dis- 

 cusses extensively the views of the naturalists of the 17th, 

 18th and 19th centuries prior to Pasteur, most of whom 

 believed in the spontaneous origin of life in its well de- 

 veloped forms. Such ridiculous tales as the origin of mice 

 or grasshoppers from the ground or of birds from the fruits 

 of trees are reported in Oparin's book in detail. 



As equally irrational, Oparin rejects the futile attempts 

 of the post-Pasteurian period to prove that life should be 

 "eternal"; in other words, that it should have been trans- 

 ferred from planet to planet in the sense of the panspermic 

 theory of 8. Arrhenius, which we have discussed. It may 

 be mentioned that Arrhenius was not the originator of this 

 idea since Lord Kelvin postulated the "eternity" of life as 



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