IX] OF MOLECULAR ASYMMETRY 417 



and by no means without its interest for the morphoJogist, to 

 discover how it is that nature, for each particular substance, 

 habitually builds up, or at least selects, its molecules in a one- 

 sided fashion, right-handed or left-handed as the case may be. 

 It will serve us no better to assert that this phenomenon has its 

 origin in "fortuity," than to repeat the Abbe Galiani's saying, 

 "Zes des de la nature sont pipes." 



The problem is not so closely related to our immediate subject 

 that we need discuss it at length ; but at the same time it has its 

 clear relation to the general question of form in relation to vital 

 phenomena, and moreover it has acquired interest as a theme 

 of long-continued discussion and new importance from some 

 comparatively recent discoveries. 



According to Pasteur, there lay in the molecular asymmetry 

 of the natural bodies and the symmetry of the artificial products, 

 one of the most deep-seated differences between vital and non- 

 vital phenomena: he went further, and declared that "this was 

 perhaps the only w^ell-marked line of demarcation that can at 

 present [1860] be drawn between the chemistry of dead and of 

 hving matter." Nearly forty years afterwards the same theme 

 was pursued and elaborated by Japp in a celebrated lecture*, 

 and the distinction still has its weight, I believe, in the minds of 

 many if not most chemists. 



"We arrive at the conclusion," said Professor Japp, "that the 

 production of single asymmetric compounds, or their isolation 

 from the mixture of their enantiomorphs, is, as Pasteur firmly 

 held, the prerogative of life. Only the living organism, or the 

 living intelligence with its conception of asymmetry, can produce 

 this result. Only asymmetry can beget asymmetry." In these 

 last words (which, so far as the chemist and the biologist are 

 concerned, we may acknowledge to be perfectly truef) lies the 



* Japp, Stereometrj^ and Vitalism, Brit. Ass. Rep. (Bristol), p. 813, 1898; 

 cf. also a voluminous discussion in Nature, 1898-9. 



■f They represent the general theorem of which particular cases are found, for 

 instance, in the asymmetry of the ferments (or enzymes) which act upon 

 asymmetrical bodies, the one fitting the other, according to Emil Fischer's well- 

 known phrase, as lock and key. Cf. his Bedeutung der Stereochemie fiir die 

 Physiologie, Z. f. physiol. Chemie, v, p. 60, 1899, and various papers in the Ber. 

 d. d. chem. Ges. from 1894. 



T fi 27 



