ON ARTIFICIAL CELLS 131 



seek are blurred and indistinct; the creatures that 

 we think have been are more the creatures of 

 our own fancy than the actual bodies that many 

 of us would now give the whole world to see. 



Those things that once have been have left the 

 gaps that science has to fill. But fill them it never 

 will. It may supply the missing links in a few in- 

 stances, though produce them in full it cannot do ; 

 for most of those links we would look for are lost 

 for ever in that world that is past. 



We have to try, then, in endeavouring to ap- 

 proximate to a solution of the problem of the 

 origin of life, to determine some method of manu- 

 facturing, or more accurately of synthesising, 

 artificial cells of such substances as those of which 

 protoplasm itself is composed ; and of obtaining 

 by such artificial processes bodies which shall have 

 some of the qualities or properties of living things 

 as they have been handed down to us by Nature. 

 The most that we can hope to do is to synthesise 

 cells which, like radiobes, and such others as have 

 been described, can go through some of the pro- 

 cesses of vitality. Cells which would possess, per- 

 haps, (n — 1), (w — 2), or (n — A) of the properties 

 of living protoplasm. Such bodies would not have 

 survived on account of their inability to overcome 

 the opposing or contending forces of their sur- 

 roundings. But it is by this means that we may 

 hope to mount the scale and approximate, though 

 we should never hope to reach, that structure 

 which we call living matter. 



K 2 



