RETROSPECT 



A revolutionary fact which emerged from the synthesis of organic 

 compounds was that, in chemistry, there is no fundamental difference 

 between living and inanimate matter. The complicated process of 

 metabolism is not controlled by some special vital principle, but has 

 its being in the co-ordination of innumerable reactions, each and all, 

 being separately accessible to causal investigation. Yet no simple 

 mechanistic interpretation can account for their delicately attuned 

 harmony and their purposiveness. Morphological formations in the 

 submicroscopic world present an exactly similar case. Whoever had 

 expected to find special formative principles, alien to the inanimate 

 world, in these invisible regions, is doomed by the results of research 

 into natural substances of high molecular weight to as great a dis- 

 appointment as was at one time suffered by the believers in mysterious 

 life forces which alone were deemed capable of building up organic 

 compounds. The formative forces in protoplasm and its derivatives 

 are no different from those operating within inanimate Nature. There 

 is no evidence of the existence of formative principles beyond the 

 atomic valency and the various molecular cohesive forces in their vari- 

 ous patterns. This need cause no surprise if it be remembered that, in 

 the molecular world, the chemical and formative properties merge into 

 each other. In that realm, chemistry and morphology become in- 

 separably one, since every morphological change which a molecule 

 undergoes inevitably involves chemical changes. All metabolic 

 processes therefore run parallel to changes in molecular form. For 

 this reason substance and form are closely interrelated, not only in 

 the inanimate world, where every compound can be clearly classified 

 by its molecular or crystal structure, but in living matter as well. The 

 idea of an essential difference between the morphology of the animate 

 and that of the inanimate world has no place in the theory of sub- 

 microscopic morphology. 



Just as organic chemistry grew out of inorganic chemistry and has 



