CHAPTER X 



FURTHER SPECULATION AS TO 



THE ORIGIN AND NATURE 



OF LIFE 1 



Preliminary Remarks on Recent Views 

 in Chemistry. 



It is a fact extremely familiar to chemists 

 that the groupings possible to atoms of 

 carbon are exceptionally numerous and com- 

 plicated, each carbon atom having the 

 power of linking itself with others to an 

 extraordinary extent, so that it is no excep- 

 tional thing to find a substance which 

 contains twenty or thirty atoms of carbon 

 as well as other elements linked together in 

 its molecule in a perfectly definite way, the 



1 An article reprinted from the North American Review 



for May 1905. 



179 



