272 Transactions of the Canadian Institute. [vol. ix 



life. Only a year or two ago such was the wonder that these achieve- 

 ments aroused that it seemed to some as if it was perhaps but the matter 

 of a few years and we should really have synthetic proteins with the high- 

 est credentials in our hands. And it may indeed be that it is only faint- 

 hearted, common mortals that stand aghast and incredulous before the 

 notion that the sort of means hitherto at the disposal of synthetic chem- 

 ists should be adequate for such a feat as this. 



And yet it is a fact that there have been others who felt, however 

 dazzling these marvels might be, that even this supreme achievement 

 must leave us pretty much where we were with regard to the real problems 

 of the chemistry of life. Indispensable as it necessarily is that we 

 should know what we have to deal with as we creep up to the last de- 

 fences of material truth, the real thing when it comes, and if it comes, 

 must be something different from these reconnoitring essays. If life 

 is all a manifestation of chemical laws, these laws have another quality 

 from that which they have as they have been observed in the laboratory. 

 It is a commonplace of physiological philosophy that points out that the 

 behaviour of substances in living organisms is entirely different from 

 that which the same substances appear to exhibit where there is no life. 

 The burning of alcohol or the carbohydrates of which wood is composed, 

 as commonly made use of for the generation of heat and the performance 

 of work in the arts, bears no kind of sensible resemblance to the burning 

 of similar substances in our bodies. The fierce heat evolved and the 

 pungent, poisonous by-products make it inconceivable to the uninitiated 

 that there should be anything of the kind going on where there is life. 

 The end products in the main may be the same, but in the living process 

 the end products are turned out clean and quantitatively and all in the 

 quiet orderly way which well regulated life requires. And on the other 

 hand at one moment the activities that result from this burning may be 

 passionately strong, as when a horse gallops past the winning post, and 

 the next be tranquil, placid, almost imperceptible, as the movements in 

 the sleep of a child. Fats and oils again are familiar as substances that 

 burn fiercely, it is true, but under the sort of physical conditions which 

 our senses would tell us must obtain in the bodies of animals, they are 

 among the most stable of natural products. Substances of this nature 

 have been found in the caves of Egypt practically unchanged, though 

 it is thousands of years since they were put there for the sustenance of 

 the departed soul. And yet an animal that is kept without food lives 

 for days, and its heart and muscles and kidneys do their work as smoothly 

 and uninterruptedly as ever, when it can be shown that nine-tenths of 

 this work is the outcome of the quiet oxidation of fat. The same common- 

 place points out that the changes which the foodstuffs undergo in assimi- 



