46 READINGS IN BIOLOGICAL SCIENCE 



given there seem to be two possibilities as to where life first appears, 

 either as macro-molecules in the form of genes or macro-molecules as 

 viruses. Both genes and viruses fit in part into the Mechanistic and the 

 Vitalistic theories of life. But whatever the first form of life was, we may 

 well assume that the enzyme is the precursor of life, and whenever it finds 

 itself in a favorable environment it becomes active and Ufe begins. 



THE LENS TURNED ON LIFE * 

 DONALD CULROSS PEATTIE 



It is Sunday, with a Sabbath meekness on the face of things. Across the 

 roll and dip of the great plain I saw, as I went walking with my black- 

 thorn, the distant woods as blue-black, rainy-looking islands upon the im- 

 mense watery prairie, and near at hand the young yellow of the willow 

 whips, first brilliance of the year. Now this was a scene a midlander could 

 love, but I went thinking, thinking, wagging that human tail my cane, how 

 all that I saw came to me thus only because of a specified convexity in the 

 cornea of my eye. 



The trouble with our human concepts is that we are so pitifully small 

 when it comes to the great, and so unbearably gross when it comes to the 

 small. We occupy a position in the scale of things that is somewhat on the 

 trivial side of total mediocrity. Little wonder if our ideas are mediocre 

 too. 



One comes at last to feel that the invention of the microscope by Janssen 

 of Holland in the seventeenth century was the beginning of modern natural 

 history, for the lens added a new dimension to our eyes and enabled us 

 literally to see to the heart of many a problem. The sentence I have just 

 written sounds good enough to pass unchallenged. But it sounds better 

 than it is, for it seems to assert that one man invented the microscope, and 

 it leaves us to infer that, once it was invented, men, peering through it, 

 saw truth at last. In fact, however, having seventeenth-century minds, 

 they did not in the least make of what they saw what we would. Except for 

 a few larger minds, the early microscopists were largely engaged in 

 watching the antics of fleas. 



And the revolution in biological thought consequent on the use of the 

 microscope did not take place in the seventeenth century but in the un- 

 finished century, 1850 to our times. It is the modern technical improve- 

 ments, coupled with the forward march of allied sciences, that have created 

 the merciful triumphs of bacteriology, carried us into a deep perspective 

 of atomic structure and brought light into the dark mystery of protoplasm 



* Reprinted from Green Laurels by permission of Simon and Schuster, Inc. Copy- 

 right 1936, by Donald Culross Peattie. 



