CHAPTER II. 

 WHAT IS LIFE? 



Life began sometime in the past history of the earth or 

 else with the beginning of time. If it is a property of 

 matter and came to exist far back in the Paleozoic ages 

 when the world was young, conditions must have first 

 become suitable for it to appear. It did not appear as a 

 cell or bacterium but as one of those primordial cells or 

 ultramicroscopic beings, which we now find organized 

 into the perfect animal we call cell. This primordial being 

 must have existed for ages as a single separate individual 

 before it began its social life in the cell It did not th^n 

 understand how to transform solar energy into chemical 

 energy and thereby make the food now used by us and 

 the cells. 



This primordial cell without doubt exists today in a 

 single state. There must exist at the present time a 

 whole world of living creatures which have never been 

 seen by the microscope, of all sizes from the single separ- 

 ate primordial cell up to those cells we call bacteria, pro- 

 Jozoa and the plant and animal building cells. We can 

 never find out what life really is until we can invent a 

 method by which we can study and understand the inner 

 life of the primordial being which builds the cells. Up 

 to the present time we can see that life exists only in this 

 animal we call cell. A cell can come only from another 



