LIFE AND SCIENCE 



produce chlorophyll ; and yet, which was first, the 

 leaf or the chlorophyll? 



Professor Czapek is convinced that "some sub- 

 stances must exist in protoplasm which are directly 

 responsible for the life processes," and yet the chem- 

 ists cannot isolate and identify those substances. 



How utterly unmechanical a living body is, at 

 least how far it transcends mere mechanics is 

 shown by what the chemists call " autolysis." Pul- 

 verize your watch, and you have completely de- 

 stroyed everything that made it a watch except the 

 dead matter; but pulverize or reduce to a pulp a 

 living plant, and though you have destroyed all cell 

 structure, you have not yet destroyed the living 

 substance; you have annihilated the mechanism, 

 but you have not killed the something that keeps up 

 the life process. Protoplasm takes time to die, but 

 your machine stops instantly, and its elements are 

 no more potent in a new machine than they were at 

 first. " In the pulp prepared by grinding down liv- 

 ing organisms in a mortar, some vital phenomena 

 continue for a long time." The life processes cease, 

 and the substances or elements of the dead body re- 

 main as before. Their chemical reactions are the 

 same. There is no new chemistry, no new mechanics, 

 no new substance in a live body, but there is a new 

 tendency or force or impulse acting in matter, inspir- 

 ing it, so to speak, to new ends. It is here that ideal- 

 ism parts company with exact science. It is here that 



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