The Evolution of the Sciences 



mitted them at another sitting. My learned 

 friend, M. Henneguy, professor of cytology at 

 the College de France, said to me on this occasion, 

 They look like frogs' eggs in course of 

 segmentation.' ' 



Naturally, no scientist was misled by these 

 appearances, of which Sir W. Ramsay has 

 supplied a very simple explanation : the vacuoles 

 in question are simply gas bubbles due to the 

 decomposition of the water by the emanation 

 of the radium. It therefore appears necessary 

 to make a selection among these pretended 

 syntheses of life and to retain only those which 

 teach a lesson regarding the real mechanism of life. 



So-called inert matter is not only capable of 

 imitating the forms of living matter, but presents 

 in a certain degree the same functions and pro- 

 perties as the consideration of the morphological 

 synthesis of M. Leduc has already proved. But 

 nothing could be more convincing than the facts 

 brought forward by an Indian physicist, Mr 

 Jagadis Chunder Bose, 1 professor at Calcutta. 



1 Response in the Living and Non-living, Longmans, Green 

 & Co., London, 1902. 



280 



