232 FROM FISH TO PHILOSOPHER 



44. RoMER, A. S. The Vertebrate Story. University of 

 Chicago Press, Chicago, 1959. 



45. RoMER, A. S., AND B. H. Grove. Environment of the 

 early vertebrates. American Midland Naturalist, 16: 



805. 1935. 



46. Smith, H. W. The absorption and excretion of water 

 and salts by marine teleosts. American Journal of 

 Physiology, 93: 480. 1930. 



47. Smith, H. W. Water regulation and its evolution in 

 the fishes. Quarterly Review of Biology, 7: 1. 1932. 



48. White, E. I. Jamoytius kerwoodi, a new chordate 

 from the Silurian of Lanarkshire. Geological Maga- 

 zine, 83: 89. 1946. 



Some years ago L. J. Henderson wrote a charming 

 and commanding book called The Fitness of the En- 

 vironment {35}, in which he pointed to the imique 

 properties of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, water, carbonic 

 acid, and other biochemically important materials, as 

 all contriving to make life possible. Where there had 

 hitherto been much talk of the ^fitness of the organism' 

 to the environment, Henderson sought to emphasize that 

 the properties of the environment (at the atomic and 

 molecular level) uniquely prepare it to sustain the proc- 

 esses of hfe. Henderson was neither a vitaHst nor tele- 

 ologist and indeed he declared himself to be a forthright 

 mechanist: *Given matter, energy, and the resulting ne- 

 cessity that life shall be a mechanism,' he said, *the con- 

 clusion follows that the atmosphere of solid bodies (such 

 as the earth) does actually provide the best of all possi- 

 ble environments for life.' In assessing Professor Hender- 

 son's arguments, we may note that life fits its environ- 

 ment and that its environment fits life, because life has 

 been spim out of the very atoms and molecxiles which 

 Henderson took as 'given'; but if one presupposes the 

 slightest change in the properties of any of these atoms, 

 then matter would be dijBFerent, and so, consequently, 

 would life. We can be sure that they would still both 



