414 PLANT PHYSIOLOGY 



planet could see the New York subway system with its trains at 

 regular intervals, it would all look to be purely mechanical and 

 automatic. But the more mind there is behind it, the more auto- 

 matic and mechanistic it looks! 



Mechanism has made rapid strides and has done much. It has 

 made analyses of the organism and has shown that an enormous 

 number of previously mysterious processes can be easily explained 

 on a physicochemical basis. It is a matter of easy demonstration 

 that "Man as an animal contains enough fat for seven bars of 

 soap, iron enough for an eight-penny nail, sugar enough to fill a 

 shaker, lime enough to whitewash a chicken-coop, phosphorus 

 enough to make 2,200 match tips, enough magnesium for a dose 

 of salts, potassium enough to explode a toy cannon, and sulfur 

 enough to rid a dog of fleas, the total cost of which is about ninety- 

 eight cents," which is not enough to cause megalocephaly. In 

 many of our large museums, one may see on display in a separate 

 case these various elements which go to "The Making of a Man," 

 with a jar containing about 125 pounds of water thrown in to 

 make the stock complete. This exposition of the value of the 

 human organism is interesting but not convincing. There remain 

 too many unsolved problems of major importance for us to jump 

 so quickly to mechanistic conclusions at this "stage of the game." 



Unsolved Questions. — Among these problems may be men- 

 tioned the one of the origin of life. Life has either come from inor- 

 ganic matter or it was coexistent with it in the universe. Both 

 points of view have supporters. Since the chemical elements of 

 the organic world are the common ones of the inorganic, it is 

 reasonable to suppose that the living came in some way from the 

 dead. If life originated upon this planet, this is undoubtedly 

 what must have happened, inasmuch as at the time of the planet's 

 formation the conditions were not suitable for life as we know it 

 to-day. Arrhenius has suggested that the beginnings of life came 

 to this world from outside. Experiments have shown that spores 

 in a dried condition can resist very low temperatures, and while 

 it is barely possible that, driven by the pressure of light, such 

 spores could go from planet to planet, this is purely hypothetical 

 in a field where only hypotheses can at the present time be given. 



A second problem is that of the structure and composition of 

 protoplasm. It is known what elements are necessary for proto- 

 plasm and something of their proportions but, to date, this unique 



