
«FINAL DECISIVE EXPERIMENTS 279 
and never free, in the strata of water intervening 
_ between the flakes and the air. There is the further 
fact (¢) that the organisms appear almost, if not 
quite, as freely in tubes from which the air has 
been expelled by boiling as in those containing 
air. 
Taken together, these facts seem to me to make 
) out a very strong presumptive case in favour of the 
: view that silicon is capable, to some extent, of taking 
4 the place of carbon in protoplasm.! 
L[nterpretation of the Experimental Results. 
In regard to the cardinal fact of the appearance of 
organisms in the experiments that have just been 
1 Recently I had the pleasure of showing my photographs to, and 
discussing this question with, Sir William Ramsay, when he kindly 
gave me the following statement concerning “bodies analogous to 
hydrocarbons,” in which silicon occurs, and to another compound in 
which silicon in part replaces carbon :— 
“CH,, Marsh gas. C,H, Ethane. 
SiH,, Siliciuretted hydrogen. Si,H,, Silico-ethane. 
_ “The hydrocarbons run up to Cy)Hg, though no higher compound 
of silica is known than Si,H,. But there are compounds in which 
silicon in part replaces carbon: e.g. Silico-nonane. 
Nonane a Co Hao. 
Silico-nonane = SiC, Hu.” 
Then, again, Leucone, SiH,O,;, and other allied compounds of 
silicon, hydrogen and oxygen are referred to by Wohler (Az. der 
Chim. und Pharm., cxxvil. p. 457); while Friedel and Ladenburg have 
shown that there is a silicic chloroform, SiCl,H (ordinary chloroform 
being CCl,H), and also a tribasic silicic ether, SiH (C*H®O),, as well 
as other allied bodies in which silicon exists as one atom of each com- 
pound. They succeeded likewise in producing an oxychloride of sili- 
con, and other more complex members of the same series (Comptes 
Rendus, t. \xvi. pp. 539 and 816). 
