NEWEST IDEAS AS TO WHAT IS LIFE 



of puppies or chickens ; not of figs or thistles even. 

 In the present state of our knowledge the step from 

 a coral polyp to an oyster, for example, let alone 

 a human being, the number of whose brain-cells 

 alone outruns the number of people who dwell upon 

 this earth, is immeasurably greater than from a 

 piece of coal-tar to the coral polyp. 



But this close pressing of the most intimate se- 

 crets of life has another implication of far more in- 

 terest to the men and women of to-day. The mat- 

 ter I touch on now is so extremely new that it has 

 been reached, so to speak, only by the outermost 

 line of pickets. Here and there men of lively and 

 daring imaginations, such as Newton and Faraday 

 had, have caught sight of it, but their previsions 

 seem as bizarre to their fellows as to the layman 

 who reads and dreams merely. It is, in brief, that 

 perhaps all the processes of life are reversible- 

 growth even; that under given conditions the oak 

 might become an acorn, the grown man a child, the 

 adult organism led back through the successive 

 stages of its development to the primitive germ 

 from which it sprang. 



Recent research has shown that every step in the 

 process of assimilation, or nutrition, is presided 

 over by a special ferment. And what we call 

 growth is but cell division, a mechanical splitting- 

 up of one cell to form two, when, through an in- 



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