THE BAFFLING PROBLEM 



IV 



Our French biologist is of the opinion that the ar- 

 tificial production of that marvel of marvels, the 

 living cell, will yet take place in the laboratory. 

 But the enlightened mind, he says, does not need 

 such proof to be convinced that there is no essential 

 difference between living and non-living matter. 



Professor Henderson, though an expounder of the 

 mechanistic theory of the origin of life, admits that 

 he does not know of a biological chemist to whom 

 the "mechanistic origin of a cell is scientifically im- 

 aginable." Like Professor Loeb, he starts with the 

 vital; how he came by it we get no inkling; he con- 

 fesses frankly that the biological chemist cannot 

 even face the problem of the origin of life. He 

 quotes with approval a remark of Liebig's, as re- 

 ported by Lord Kelvin, that he (Liebig) could no 

 more believe that a leaf or a flower could be formed 

 or could grow by chemical forces "than a book on 

 chemistry, or on botany, could grow out of dead 

 matter." Is not this conceding to the vitalists all 

 that they claim? The cell is the unit of life; all liv- 

 ing bodies are but vast confraternities of cells, some 

 billions or trillions of them in the human body; the 

 cell builds up the tissues, the tissues build up the 

 organs, the organs build up the body. Now if it is 

 not thinkable that chemism could beget a cell, is it 

 any more thinkable that it could build a living tis- 



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