78 THE ORIGIN OF LIFE 



oxalates, and tartrates, alkaline and earthy phosphates, 

 and water, without the aid of light. Such was the 

 expectation to which analogical reasoning led him ; 

 but he begged of us once more to recollect that he 

 had no right to call his opinion anything but an 

 act of philosophic faith. 



It is that unstable condition of inorganic matter 

 possessing an apparently inexplicable source of energy 

 that we have been in need of, and which has at last 

 reached us in the form of radio-active bodies, that 

 leads us once more to think that we have, perhaps, at 

 length reached this dream of the evolution of living 

 from non-living matter. 



One of the great objections to the theory of " vital 

 force " — which strictly speaking was not a force at 

 all, but a particular condition of matter — was that it 

 apparently contradicted the principle of the conserva- 

 tion of energy, as the energy of radium seems to do : 

 but, of course, in reality cannot do. 



There is apparently a source of energy in living 

 things which is not included in their chemico-phyaioal 

 relations, and this property appears at last to have 

 been detected in inorganic matter, by the discovery of 

 such peculiar unstable systems as we have discoursed 

 upon. The old philosophers, like the great physio- 

 logist Johannes Miiller, would once more have called 

 it " vital force," and they would not really have been 

 far out if they merely meant vital energy. 



If these conceptions be correct, then in the " vital 

 putrefaction of the dust " have the first elements of 

 life originated, and thus most assuredly would it be 



