The Organism, and its Chemistri/ 113 



and especially the neo-Darwinian hypothesis. 



Natural history, then, is able with a strength peculiarly 

 its own to deny physiology's right to set aside as accidental 

 myriads of biological phenomena in tlie interest of inorganic 

 hypothesizing about organic beings. Naturalists are in 

 position to insist tliat physical and chemical conceptions 

 as applied to organisms must be somehow so shaped that 

 they will neither disregard nor minimize the im})ortance of 

 vast numbers of facts about the living world wliich natural 

 history from her own peculiar labors knows to be facts. 



So the naturalist pushes his quest among his biochemical 

 confreres still more closely and broadly, for his general 

 scientific sense and faith lead him to surmise that some- 

 where chemistry has something better than the accident 

 hypothesis for dealing with the undeniable difficulties which 

 the individual, varietal, specific and generic substances and 

 activities present. Physiology almost certainly found the 

 right starting point or base of operations for a broader, 

 more adequate application of physics and chemistry to 

 biology when it recognized (as indicated on a previous 

 page) the fundamental difference between living and dead 

 protoplasm. Once the full significance of this difference 

 is recognized, biochemistry will be able to go ahead in its 

 service of biology — and of human weal in general — unliam- 

 pered by hypotheses that are really narrowing because too 

 grasping. 



Let me assure those biological readers whose scientific 

 thinking has been more or less deranged by the dread bogy, 

 Vitalism, that there is not the slightest real danger of run- 

 ning into Vitalism in the direction indicated. There is no 

 such danger because what we are here concerned witli does 

 not raise the metaphysical problem of a A^ital Force, or for 

 that matter of any other "ultimate force." The strictly 

 scientific problem before us is in deepest essence of the same 

 pature as it is in its most obvious, most practical expression. 



