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54 PROCEEDINGS OF THE SOCIETY. 



Professor Benjamin Moore, F.R.S., in an address on " Early Stages 

 in the Evolntion of Life," commnnicated the results of some of his 

 experimental researches. He assumed that the earliest life upon the 

 eaiiyh must have been something in the nature of a chemical substance 

 rather than a unicellular organism, some simple substance able to at 

 once act upon light, which could utilize that source of energy, and by 

 the agency of the carbonic acid of the atmosphere build up, increase, 

 and produce other more highly organized substances and systems. 

 Chlorophyll, which possessed many of these attributes, was much too 

 highly complex a substance to regard as the first stage between the 

 organic and the inorganic. He, therefore, took a quartz tube, which 

 would transmit nearly all the rays of the spectrum, containing a simple 

 inorganic substance, such as silica in the form of silicic acid saturated 

 with carbon dioxide (which would have existed on the earth's surface in 

 its very early days), and exposed it to the sun's rays. After some time 

 he tested his solution and found that an appreciable amount of formal- 

 dehyde had Ijeen formed. Formaldehyde was the earliest substance 

 produced by plants, and weight for weight formaldehyde had nearly as 

 much energy as sugar. 



In some concentrations formaldehyde destroyed living cells, but in 

 a solution of one part per million Professor Moore found that certain 

 colourless organisms could live and multiply. 



He next described his experiments on the production of artificial 

 silica growths. Silica might be regarded as a form of colloid ; 

 colloids were substances in which the simple chemical molecules were 

 joined up in the groups of t^'enty or thirty, and in these groups existed 

 possibilities for morphological groupings and changes such as he next 

 demonstrated. 



Professor Moore showed a series of photomicrograms, prepared by 

 Mr. Barnard, of peculiar forms of growth — resembling the hyphfe of 

 moulds — which had appeared in his masses of silica jelly, gradually 

 solidifying in consequence of water evaporation, which had been exposed 

 to light in glass plates, properly protected against the entrance of 

 extraneous organisms. These structures he contended must be regarded 

 either as inorganic, but giving the first indications towards organic 

 structure, or else as a simpler stage of organic material. 



The President called attention to the remarkable and as yet 

 wholly inexplicable phenomena that had. rewarded Professor Benjamin 

 Moore's assiduous labours in a most mysterious field of biology — the 

 border-land lietween the organic and the inorganic — and expressed the 

 hope that Professor Moore would communicate the further develop- 

 ments to the Society as they arose. He then asked Mr. J. E. Barnard, 

 who had been engaged with Professor Moore in this work, to open the 

 discussion. 



Mr. Barnard said that it was only at a relatively late stage that he 

 had taken a part in the investigations. Professor Moore had said that 

 a scientist was not much good unless he had imagination, and during 

 these enquiries that truth had come home, to him, because objects of 

 this character puzzled any one to say what they were, hence one was 

 reduced to imagining what they might be. They possessed very few of 



