An asterisk (*) after an author's name refers to a reference in the index of 

 names. 



PART III. 

 THE ORGANISM AS A COLLOID SYSTEM. 



The Significance of the Colloidal Condition for the Organism. 



RECENTLY, I read in a French magazine, a fantastic description 

 of a visit to the Martians. They were pictured as men with iron 

 faces; with a great bill replacing the nose; three glass eyes and 

 joints and limbs of iron. Why did not the artist construct his 

 people of a material actually found on that planet? If we assume 

 that life exists on other planets and disregard the theory of pan- 

 spermogenesis 1 accepted as probable by Sv. ARRHENIUS, a priori it is 

 probable that life is associated with substances similar to those with 

 which it is associated on our earth. One thing I can assert, that 

 whatever the material composition of such living beings may be, it must 

 be colloidal in nature. 



Those iron Martians could no more exist than could crystallized 

 life. What condition of matter, other than the colloidal, could 

 adopt such changeable, such plastic shapes, and yet, when necessary, 

 be hi a position to maintain them. 



An exchange of substance may occur in jellies as well as in a fluid; 

 in the latter the least touch, an unintentioned movement, disturbs 

 the result of diffusion and brings about the death of the system; 

 the changes in a jelly are fixed as in a solid mass. Colloids may form 

 permeable walls or membranes, whose permeability is regulated by 

 the substances which pass through them; thus, for instance, the 

 sulphates which are less important to the organism close the passages 

 on themselves; the chlorids facilitate their own entrance. 



Foods enter our digestive tract in colloidal condition, as albumin 

 and starches. Made fluid and easily diffusible by the enzymes, they 

 penetrate the organism in order to be fixed and again transformed 

 into colloids. In that condition only are they retained by the or- 

 ganism and prevented from flowing away. Colloids, because of their 



1 According to this theory, it is conceivable that germs of life travel from one 

 planet to another and that they develop there under favorable circumstances, 

 so that, to a certain extent, one star infects another one with life. 



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