THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF LIFE 8i 



unfavourable conditions, notwithstanding the most 

 adverse circumstances, have managed to persist. 

 How different, then, should we expect them to be 

 from anything that may now arise, by comparatively 

 simple processes ? This is a point that cannot be too 

 strongly emphasised. And if we are in search of the 

 first beginnings of life to-day, it must be in such 

 elementary reactions as some of those which we have 

 endeavoured to depict. 



To expect to make a full-blown bacillus at the 

 present day would not be more absurd than to try 

 to manufacture a man ! The actual potentiality in 

 the bacillus must overpower the imagination even of 

 the most imaginative minds. Clerk Maxwell esti- 

 mated that the living cell cannot contain much 

 more than two million atoms, and he did not think 

 that all the variety we see in Nature could be 

 adequately accounted for by the arrangements of 

 this comparatively small number of units. To some 

 minds it seems as if, with the possible combinations 

 of that number of units, it ought to be possible to do 

 and to produce anything. But when we bear in 

 mind that it is not all possible combinations, but 

 only those which are necessarily confined to the 

 particular accidental changes that may arise in 

 protoplasm — the atoms constituting it being already 

 arranged in certain groups with these limitations 

 and restrictions — then the immense variety of living 

 types in Nature, and the still greater number of 

 varied qualities amongst these types themselves, 

 become so amazing. But this is not all. The types 



