2i6 THE ORIGIN OF LIFE 



its effects would depend upon tlie quality and 

 the nature of the matter traversed. Thus the 

 amount of metabolism could be mapped out re- 

 latively to the centre or nucleus. The assimilation 

 would no doubt depend largely upon the nature 

 of the cell walls, and where there is absorption of 

 certain substances in preference to others it is 

 the result of electrification of the nucleus which 

 would thus attract to itself those ions which carried 

 the opposite charge. 



It thus seems that the flow and flux in cellular 

 bodies can ultimately be traced to the electrical 

 properties of the substance in the nth or ultimate 

 nucleus. The cell should be regarded as made 

 up of smaller and smaller structures until we get 

 to the molecules and the atoms themselves, and 

 even these would seem, in the light of recent in- 

 vestigations, to be structural bodies too. Thus a 

 comprehension of the nature of the whole process 

 really resolves itself into a complete understand- 

 ing of the mechanism which goes on, not merely 

 in the cell itself as a whole, but also in its 

 constituent parts. This understanding, however, 

 we cannot hope to arrive at, and we can only 

 endeavour to picture to ourselves roughly at least 

 an idea of what that mechanism may be. 



In the limit — using the word in its mathematical 

 sense — we find that the phenomena of meta- 

 bolism ultimately resolve themselves into the 

 phenomena of purely physical metabolic inter- 

 actions. The evidence for this will become more 



