THE OVERCOMING OF APPEARANCES 33 



viscous mass much like the slime of life we call protoplasm. 

 Add some charcoal from the hearth, some nitrogen and oxygen 

 from the air, mix in a little sulphur, take some phosphorus for 

 the brain, a trace of arsenic and some of the mineral salts, and 

 the analysis, alike for a Shakespeare, a Newton, or a witch- 

 burner, is complete. 



True, we may not as yet take carbon, water, ammonia, and 

 a few salts and produce living matter ; but I think the day 

 when we shall is less distant than the end of the world. 



If the telescope, reaching into the depths of stellar space, 

 has seemed to reduce not merely man on his earth, but the 

 whole solar realm to an atom of the cosmos, he has found in 

 the microscope and in the test-tube of the chemist the salva- 

 tion of his pride. But the revelations of the latter have not 

 been less destructive to his primitive ways of thought. 



Thus as he has found the heavens stretching away in 

 a seeming unending welter of suns, so, floating invisible in 

 the air about him, in the very air he breathes, he has learned 

 to know that there are organisms so minute that, compared 

 to them, he is a greater figure than the earth to him. They 

 may and do infest the body in multitudinous hordes, and he 

 be never aware of the fact. These are living beings, for they 

 grow and reproduce as do other living things, and yet their 

 organisation is so relatively simple that already the chemist, 

 entrenching upon the domain of the physiologist, has caught 

 a glimpse of their physical structure. It was, in truth, from 

 their action upon different substances, that Pasteur, a chemist, 

 was led to their discovery. And just as to-day the organic 

 chemist takes apart the molecules of one kind of sugar to put 

 them together again in another way to form forty other kinds, 

 so the amazing achievements of Emil Fischer and his fellow- 

 workers point to the day when they will do the same with the 

 molecules of living matter which make up a microscopic 

 bacterium. 



Indeed, even if such a result had not been predicted by 

 the recent attainments of biological chemistry, it would have 

 been foreshadowed by the equally astonishing advance of his- 

 tology, or micro-anatomy. It is a commonplace of these latter 

 days that alike the oak and the turtle, man and all things living, 

 are made up of bacteria-like units, the cells. By processes hardly 



c 



