LIFE AND SCIENCE 



chemist has yet been able to do; it can manufacture 

 chlorophyll, a substance which is the basis of all life 

 on the globe. Without chlorophyll (the green sub- 

 stance in plants) the solar energy could not be 

 stored up in the vegetable world. Chlorophyll makes 

 the plant, and the plant makes chlorophyll. To ask 

 which is first is to call up the old puzzle, Which is 

 first, the egg, or the hen that laid it? 



According to Professor Soddy, the engineer's 

 unit of power, that of the British cart-horse, has to 

 be multiplied many times in a machine before it can 

 do the work of a horse. He says that a car which 

 two horses used to pull, it now takes twelve or fif- 

 teen engine-horse to pull. The machine horse be- 

 longs to a different order. He does not respond to 

 the whip; he has no nervous system; he has none of 

 the mysterious reserve power which a machine built 

 up of living cells seems to possess; he is inelastic, 

 non-creative, non-adaptive; he cannot take advan- 

 tage of the ground; his pull is a dead, unvarying pull. 

 Living energy is elastic, adaptive, self-directive, 

 and suffers little loss through friction, or through 

 imperfect adjustment of the parts. A live body con- 

 verts its fuel into energy at a low temperature. One 

 of the great problems of the mechanics of the future 

 is to develop electricity or power directly from fuel 

 and thus cut out the enormous loss of eighty or 

 ninety per cent which we now suffer. The growing 

 body does this all the time; life possesses this secret; 



177 



