38 THE ORIGIN OF LIFE 



the point insisted on being merely that there 

 is such an approximately continuous series and that 

 more elementary and more unstable forms of life than 

 bacteria have once been and can to some extent at 

 least again be brought about. 



That there is actual transmutation is what we do 

 not afl&rm, because it probably cannot and does not 

 take place. 



Having said thus much it must, however, be 

 borne in mind that we do not plead for anything 

 outrageous. It is a theory which, however ex- 

 pressed, has been held repeatedly by some of the 

 clearest minds, as Tyndall has depicted, and the two 

 objections which at present exist in many if not most 

 men is to the transmutation of stable matter into the 

 particular unstable types of organic matter which 

 we call living proteid, and the other that anything 

 not composed of living proteid ever could have 

 been alive. 



We must therefore, in presenting the aspect of this 

 great and diflScult question, more or less, in a new 

 light, present also its intricacies, its many connecting 

 and its many missing links, under a classification 

 which, though by no means difficult to apprehend, is 

 perhaps also at the same time new. The progress 

 which has been made in our knowledge of Matter in 

 its living and in its lifeless forms and equally so 

 perhaps of Matter in that border-line between life and 

 death, which more particularly forms the subject of 

 our work, has enabled us to reconsider and to review, 

 in outline as well as in detail, the many facts in this 



