NEWEST IDEAS AS TO WHAT IS LIFE 



the red corpuscles of the blood that, in short, 

 even so simple a process as respiration was, at 

 base, a sort of fermentation was, to physiologists, 

 most untoward. But to a few a glimmer of the 

 truth must have come. 



But a difficulty stood as a gulf. Just as the 

 single experiment of Buchner's on yeast-cells meant 

 certainly that every form of fermentation by mi- 

 crobes, fungi, or other living things was due to a 

 specific chemical substance, so did Bertrand's dis- 

 covery foreshadow the belief that all vital actions 

 are in the nature of fermentations. But fermen- 

 tation is destructive. Nothing could be more 

 firmly based than that. The ferment of malt 

 splits up sugar into alcohol and carbonic acid; 

 the pepsin of the stomach breaks down the al- 

 buminous foods into simpler molecules, peptones, 

 etc. So all through. On the other hand, side by 

 side with the incessant destruction which is one of 

 the two most striking characteristics of the life- 

 process, is incessant construction. Before catab- 

 olism there must be anabolism. Indeed, the de- 

 struction, the analysis, is death, rather; it is the 

 upbuilding, the synthesis, which is life. But a 

 constructive ferment was a plain contradiction in 

 terms. 



Scientific nomenclature or, rather, scientific 

 short-hand is a little forbidding at times, and so 



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