1908-9. ] ON THE ORIGIN OF LIFE ON THE GLOBE. 425 
for organisms even under the most favorable conditions on our own 
planet have not in any case shown a capacity to remain germinative for 
more than a few years and consequently organisms which might arrive, 
meteorite-borne, from far distant stellar systems, even if they were not 
utterly destroyed by the intense heat generated at the moment of con- 
tact with the earth’s atmosphere, would he utterly sterile. 
This theory of the origin of life on the globe, now known as Pan- 
spermia, as already stated, did not receive general support and it would 
have perhaps in all discussions of the subject been deserving only of a 
reference had it not been revived in another form in 1903 by Arrhenius, 
the Swedish Chemist,* who employed the recently discovered fact of the 
pressure exercised by light and other radiations to show that organisms 
could be driven through space independently of meteorites and at a 
velocity enormously greater than the latter manifest. The pressure > 
exerted by these radiations would, according to Arrhenius’ calculations 
reduce the time for the transportation of organisms from a Centauri 
from 62,000,000 years to 9,000 years and from Mars to Earth to twenty 
days. 
The greatest difficulty in the way of accepting the hypothesis of 
Panspermia is not the great length of time, shortened as it is by the 
motive power of the radiations, but the intense cold and light to which 
the organisms would be subjected in their course through space, but 
Arrhenius holds that this difficulty does not obtain. He cites the obser- 
vations made by Duclaux on Typothrix scaber, an organism which 
occurs in milk and which is capable of undergoing a month’s exposure 
to bright sunlight without injury and Roux has shown that the organ- 
isms causing splenic fever are not injured by bright light when they are 
kept in a vacuum. From this it would appear that oxygen must be 
present in order that light shall injuriously affect bacteria. 
Intense cold, Arrhenius points out, does not necessarily act injuri- 
ously on all germs. Macfayden kept spores of bacteria at -200° C. for 
two months without affecting them appreciably. The intense degree of 
cold should not be destructive but preservative, for the diminution and, 
eventually, the loss of germinative power is certainly due to slow 
chemical changes, the rapidity of which is greatly diminished when the 
temperature is lowered. Thus in the case of vital processes which have 
been investigated, a fall of 10° C. reduces the speed of reaction to 2/5 and 
therefore, the rate of reaction responsible for the ultimate loss of vitality 
*Arrhenius’ views on Panspermia are given in ‘‘ Das Werden der Welten”’ (trans. from the Swedish 
into German by L. Bamberger), Leipzig, 1907. 
