IN LIVING MATTER 3 



The rapid advances of physical chemistry within the past 

 generation have fostered and encouraged in many minds the 

 belief, which every day appears to grow stronger and more 

 popular, that all the phenomena exhibited by living structures 

 are capable of explanation by application of the laws governing 

 non-living matter, that by processes of diffusion and osmosis 

 through peculiarly constructed membranes, behaving somewhat 

 differently indeed to those as yet fabricated by the art of man, 

 but nevertheless membranes, all the complex changes and trans- 

 formations affected by the cell are capable of explanation. 



The evidence of experiment clearly shows, however, that the 

 living cell is not a peculiarly constructed membrane obeying, even 

 where it most directly seems to disobey, the physical laws of 

 diffusion and osmosis ; but is an energy machine or transformer 

 by virtue of the operation of which a form of energy appears 

 peculiar in its manifestations and phenomena to living matter, 

 and producing adaptations and combinations in non-vital 

 matter, which in many instances have not been imitated, and in 

 others have only been imitated by obviously different processes, by 

 the application of other forms of energy acting through non- vital 

 transformers. 



At the same time it may be pointed out that this in no way 

 stultifies the application of physical chemistry to biological 

 problems, or minimises the great service which an increased 

 knowledge of physical chemistry has done and will do for 

 biology. 



In recent times, advances in physical chemistry, and in the 

 knowledge of the properties of solutions, and of reactions occur- 

 ring in solution, have pointed the path to advances in biological 

 science, and it is in this direction that in the future most onward 

 movement is to be expected. 



A knowledge of physical chemistry, and more especially of the 

 laws and phenomena of solutions, both of colloids and crystalloids, 

 is indispensable to the modern biologist, taking that word in its 

 widest sense, for it is here that we shall gain our closest approach, 

 as far as can be at present seen, to the phenomena taking place in 

 the living cell. 



This follows because the cell in structure consists of colloids 

 and crystalloids in common solution in water, and hence much 

 may be gained by a knowledge of the laws of such a solution. 



