NEWEST IDEAS AS TO WHAT IS LIFE 



germ -cell we might install 27,000 liver -cells, each con- 

 taining 64,000 million living units, and each of these, in 

 turn, made up of 5000 atoms of various sorts. 



The writer has often heard intelligent people descant 

 upon the impossibility of obtaining any mechanical pict- 

 ure of the germ-cell that will tally with the supposed facts 

 of heredity. They either lack imagination or are men- 

 tally lazy. It may be added that the supposed facts of 

 heredity mostly do not exist. 



As all the assumptions involved in these calculations 

 have been explicitly stated, it will hardly be necessary to 

 warn the reader that these figures are only to be taken for 

 what they are worth. But they help to show the possi- 

 bilities that lie in the purely physical explanation of the 

 life processes. And in another twenty-five or fifty years, 

 at the present rate of advancement, this explanation will 

 be complete. Molecular physics will have reduced all the 

 phenomena of life to the play of known mechanical forces. 



