256 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1940 



point of view is that the processes of life offer no obvious contradic- 

 tion to the second law, since if all other related and simultaneous 

 actions be taken into account the total effect will be an increase of 

 entropy. (See, for example, Donnan, 1934.) That may be so, but 

 it is an unproved suggestion; and the phenomena of life and its 

 evolution are so complex that if the resolution in terms of physical 

 law of "all other related and simultaneous actions" has to be pushed 

 from item to item until, as it were, the universe is involved before a 

 balance can be struck, then entropy has little immediate significance 

 for life activity. 



It comes to this, that m practice the second law of thei-mody- 

 namics, so well established for physical happenings, cannot be satis- 

 factorily applied to living processes. And that while no one would 

 deny that living things in, the long run and in a universal sense 

 are subject to its demands, and indeed that in their workings they 

 are probably controlled by it, nevertheless organisms appear to be 

 able temporarily to hold up or withstand the physical course of 

 degradation of matter, if they do not actually reverse it. 



From this point of view, then, the secret of the livmg organism, 

 that is its essential difference from nonliving matter, is its power of 

 trading with its environment in such a way that it can build up its 

 body-stores of high potential energy from materials of lower 

 potential. 



So we are led to two conclusions. The origin of life must be 

 sought in a concourse of atoms, improbable as that may seem, which 

 traded with an inorganic environment. The first organism is un- 

 likely to have been of the nature of a virus, although viruses have 

 been suggested as the nearest approach we know to a primeval 

 existence, for whether a virus be alive or be a nonliving protein 

 molecule, it multiplies by acting upon the organic materials of its 

 host, and that presupposes the existence of other living things. It is 

 unlikely that the first organism was of the nature of a green plant, 

 for chlorophyll is a highly organized stuff, and although some form 

 of energy must have been utilized in the building up of the first 

 organic molecules, we do not know whether it was the energy of 

 sunlight, as in photosynthesis, or of a chemical reaction like the 

 chemosynthesis which characterizes the life processes of certain 

 sulfur, iron, and nitrifying bacteria. But even bacteria have their 

 organization and it may be supposed that before them there came into 

 being precellular diffuse stuffs, not yet recognizable as definite or- 

 ganisms, whose one outstanding character was their power of using 

 for their own aggrandizement some form of energy about them and 

 external to them. 



