122 life's beginning on the earth 



and cells. We see something of the secret driving forces 

 responsible for the development of plants and animals. 

 Osmotic pressure is only one of the acting forces, but an 

 important one. It was the first to be explained in terms of 

 purely physical forces, and thus stripped of the mystical 

 obscurity prevalent in oldtime biology. (Other vital forces 

 are those related to crystallization, see pages 15 to 46.) 



One may suppose that the man who initiated this great 

 new line of investigation on osmotic forces was a well known 

 professor in a famous university, but he was nothing of the 

 kind. He was a simple chemist, Moritz Traube, who lived 

 in Germany from 1818 to 1876. He published his discov- 

 eries on the expanding and shrinking of artificial cells and 

 the osmotic pressure in 1864, 1866, and 1867. 



He and a few others saw the importance of these forces in 

 explaining the life phenomena of plants and animals. Yet 

 his epoch-making work never brought him much recogni- 

 tion. The leading chemists of his day declared his work to 

 be outside the realm of pure chemistry. Most of the biolo- 

 gists refused cooperation, because Traube lacked prelim- 

 inary training in botany and zoology, sciences which busied 

 themselves exclusively with a description of the form of 

 plants and animals. The result was thai the man who pre- 

 sented to science this far-reaching discovery never obtained 

 any academic position. He became a wine merchant in a 

 small German town and pursued his research in his spare 

 time in a primitive laboratory in his home. 



Moritz Traube's fate resembles that of another pioneer 

 in a related line: Carl Naegeli, 1817 91, the discoverer of 

 crystalline constituents in living structures who also failed to 

 obtain that recognition which lie deserved. As in Naegeli's 

 case, Traube's work was recogui/ed only after his death. 



The first promoter of Traube's ideas was an able and pro- 

 gressive young botanist, \V. Pfeffer, 1845 1920, who, in 1S77 

 and later studied the osmotic pressure in plants. If was he 



