LIFE FROM A PHYSICAL STANDPOINT. 



19 



nomena of heredity, from Darwin's Pannixia to Weismann's 

 somatic and ideoplasmic cells, there is an effort to look for the 

 basis of heredity in some peculiar form or composition of mat- 

 ter, which possesses qualities unlike the other kinds of matter 

 with which it is associated. From the physical standpoint one 

 must go farther back than any combination to find the meaning 

 of any combination. If one has abandoned vital force or some 

 equivalent for it, and agrees to rely upon physics and chemis- 

 try as his antecedents, there is no good reason why he should 

 expect to get out of a hundred molecules what is not in the 

 individual molecules to begin with. Otherwise he is expecting 

 to get out of his mechanism what is not in it. 



But here, so far as the affair is a physical and chemical one, 

 the causes and the conditions of such changes as take place in 

 living organisms are altogether molecular and atomic, and no 

 one has yet seen how to endow a molecule with qualities it 

 does not originally possess ; and, so far as present- knowledge 

 goes, the way to modify the qualities of a mass of matter is to 

 change its atomic constitution, either in number or arrange- 

 ment, or both. Each new combination has its peculiar charac- 

 teristics, because \.\\^ field of any kind of a molecule is the sum 

 of the overlapping fields of its atoms. As the field determines 

 the arrangement of other matter within it, it is plain that any 

 new combination — that is, one having a new atom in it, or an 

 old one displaced in even an accidental way — would build up 

 other molecules like itself out of adjacent unorganized mate- 

 rials, and, as older organizations are necessarily more stable, 

 later atomic acquisitions must be easier lost or sloughed off, 

 and so there would be what is called reversion to earlier type, 

 yet still accounted for on purely physical principles. 



As biologists have been able to trace so-called vitality to the 

 smallest particles which can be seen, and have found that no 

 special form of matter is essential as a habitat for it, so physi- 

 cists have been able in so-called inorganic matter to trace sim- 

 ilar characteristics, and so approach the subject from another 

 side. The mineralogists themselves are asking now the ques- 

 tion whether the evidence at hand does not warrant the con- 

 clusion that matter itself is alive. That can only mean that 



