ORIGINATION OF SELF-GENERATING MATTER 279 



evolution, is quite insignificant, while even the simpler forms of 

 animals and plants are to be considered as types widely divergent 

 from primitive self-generating matter, being removed from it by the 

 slow but sure advances of untold millions of years of development. 

 It is, therefore, as if we had observed the events and objects of 

 yesterday and were called upon to read the history of the past cen- 

 tury. In the search for supporting ideas upon which to base specu- 

 lation, two conceptions serve as encouragement for a renewed attack 

 upon this fascinating problem. One is embraced by Chamberlin's 

 planetesimal theory of the growth of the earth and the attendant 

 moditication of surface conditions, which necessarily showed a com- 

 plex widely different from the present, and the other is one, growing 

 in favor with physiologists, to the effect that the essential activities of 

 living matter rest upon catalysis, and enzymatic processes, with the 

 characteristic reaction velocities directly affected by internal and 

 external limiting factors. The protamic nucleus may be taken to 

 represent the first form in which self-generating matter might be said 

 to have the characters of protoplasm, but previously to its synthesis 

 there must have occurred an increasingly complex series of carbon 

 compounds, with hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, sulphur, and phos- 

 phorus, while iron, calcium, magnesium, and potassium are also 

 involved in its activities at the present time. That these main con- 

 stituents were present in the atmosphere at partial pressures of 

 varying intensity, and that unstable carbides, nitrates, phosphides, 

 and sulphides brought by infalling planetesimals were passing into 

 more stable unions with the formation of hydrocarbons, ammonia, 

 hydrogen phosphide, etc., is suggested by Chamberlin, and the 

 possible interactions and combinations might result in the synthesis 

 of very complex substances, well up toward the simpler forms of 

 living matter. The hypothesis formulated by him also assumes that 

 the surface of the earth was unworn piled talus, but little of which 

 had gone into solution. The development of the hydrosphere 

 moistening this layer, and forming pools and small bodies of water 

 all exposed to the light of the sun, together with the variations in 

 temperature, partly due to the heat of impact of infalling bodies, the 

 influence of magnetic fields induced by bodies circulating about the 

 earth determining the paths of ions and electrons traversing them. 



