70 Causes and Course of Organic Evolution 



ondary products, or of sugar into alcohol, glycerine, and carbon 

 dioxide, are explicable, if we consider the change to be started 

 by a ferment and continued by supplies of chemical energy 

 derived from the decomposing body. But the problem becomes 

 a very difficult one — as most of our text-books openly acknow- 

 ledge — when the effort is made to synthesize, from a truly 

 inorganic source, even one of the simplest organic crystalloids 

 such as sugar or inulin. The methods are complicated; the 

 amount of energy expended for the result attained seems in 

 striking disproportion to the ease with which such bodies are 

 formed in plant tissues; while the resisting apparatus employed 

 is such as no Hving tissue can boast of. Examples are described 

 on p. 66 of the last chapter. 



Furthermore, when one observes the great amount and per- 

 fect quahty of energy displayed by a minute ciliated bacterial 

 organism, a motile Pleurococcus cell, a fern spermatozoid, or a 

 small ciliate infusor, in which reserve food products seem scant, 

 the question almost forces itself upon the attention as to whether 

 one or more definite organic energies of high quality, trans- 

 formation capacity, and energy-utilization may not after all 

 exist. 



The folloT\'ing are some of the older views of well-kno^Ti 

 plant and animal physiologists. 



Johannes Miiller says ("Physiology," Eng. ed., 1838, p. 23): 

 "The harmonious action of the essential parts of the individual 

 subsists only by the influence of a force, the operation of which 

 is extended to all parts of the body, and which does not depend 

 on any single part; this force exists before the harmonizing 

 parts, which are, in fact, formed by it during the development 

 of the embryo." And again (p. 25): "The formative or organ- 

 izing principle, on the contrary, is a creative power modifying 

 matter, blindly and unconsciously, according to the laws of 

 adaption." Also (p. 27): "Into the composition of the organic 

 rnatter of the living body, there must enter an unknoT\Ti prin- 

 ciple, or the organic matter must maintain its properties by 

 the operation of some unknowm forces. Whether this principle 

 is to be regarded as an imponderable matter, or as a force or 

 energy, is just as uncertain as the same question is in reference 

 to several important phenomena in physics. The mobility 

 of this principle is certain. Its motion is evident in innumerable 



