196 REV. A. IRVING, D.SC., B.A., ON 
interchanges which accompanied the cooling-down of the 
molten surface of the earth, some compound being probably 
formed with absorption of heat, endowed with the property of 
polymerisation and of growth at the expense of the surrounding 
material.” A rather big assumption, to which the physicist and 
the chemist are entitled to cry “ Halt!” and to decline to be 
included under the little pronoun “we,” when the learned 
physiologist says—“ We can imagine” that to be “the first 
step in the evolution of life”; and further suggests that under 
such conditions “some complex analogous to the present 
chlorophyll corpuscles” could be formed. We have the right 
to ask him if he has not overlooked the conditions of exceed- 
ingly high pressure and temperature which then existed at and 
near the surface of the globe in “the pre-oceanic stage ” of its 
history, or forgotten the rather narrow range of temperature 
within which life as we know it can manifest itself. The 
building-up of highly complex mineral molecules by an endo- 
thermic process under great heat and pressure, and their 
subsequent resolution exothermally into more stable molecules 
of less complexity has been long known to science. I discussed it 
myself years ago* ; and it has long seemed to me that here we 
get near the true account of the genesis and behaviour of such a 
complex as radium; but Professor Starling would hesitate, I 
fancy, to sugyest that radium even with all its wonderful proper- 
ties, 1s an organic compound, or endowed in any way with life. 
Pressure applied hydrostatically makes for crystallisation in 
the densest and most stable form which the particular body can 
assume, as 1 showed more than twenty years ayo.t But this 
implies an internal fixity of atoms, which is opposed to the free 
atomic movement, characteristic of the internal economy of the 
chlorophyll corpuscle.f 
We can follow Professor Starling more easily when he speaks 
of “methods adopted by organisms for their self-preservation in 
the production of some artificial surroundings, which protect 
from the buffeting of environmental changes.” This is however 
a way of putting the facts, which gives the “go-by” to the 
Darwinian notion of chance adaptation : it recognizes “ direc- 
tivity”; it introduces the idea of working for ends; and it 
leaves us face to lace with what Asa Gray§ calls “ the ‘mystery 
* Geolugical Magazine, July, 1891. 
+ Chem. Gig Vhys. Studies, etc., Section “ Metatropy.” 
t See my letter in Nature (June, 1905), on “the Romance of the 
Nitrogen Atom,” and the correspondence oe, cit. 
§ Religion and Science, Scribner, New York. 
