122 THE ORIGIN OF LIFE 



cultures produced by the action of salts on organic 

 media. Amongst the salts employed were the 

 chlorides of radium, barium, and manganese. Dubois 

 placed a small crystal of chloride of barium and radium 

 on a gelatinous culture for luminous microbes, and 

 observed that in the nutritive and colloidal jelly a 

 number of small corpuscles appeared which grew down- 

 wards in the gelatin, and at the same time increased 

 in volume. The appearance of these granules or larger 

 vacuolides is shown in the adjoining figure, taken from 

 M. Dubois's paper in the Revue des Idees, March 15th, 

 1905, where a summary of his lecture at Lyons 

 in November, 1904, is given. The opinion of 

 M. Laveran, of the Pasteur Institute, was that they 

 seemed to him to be like contaminations ; whilst that 

 of M. Henneguy, Professor of Cytology at the College 

 de France, Paris, was that they were like the eggs of 

 a frog in process of segmentation. M. Dubois affirms, 

 however, that they were not contaminations, but 

 large vacuolides, which in their more developed states 

 were in the process of segmentation or subdivision. 



Similiar effects were produced with ordinary 

 barium chloride : "If one continues to follow 

 the evolution of these corpuscles they are seen to 

 change gradually into crystals. The cycle of changes 

 in these " synthetic vacuolides," organic mineral- 

 bodies, is from birth, nourishment, growth, division, 

 and death in assuming crystalline forms. 



It is important to note that barium salts, whether 

 bromides or chlorides, give the same bodies as the 

 similar salts of barium and radium, perhaps even 



