LIFE 



of iron, whose blood is liquid metal, and whose food may 

 be meteorites." The danger of this poetic application 

 of the metaphorical sense of organism is very well seen 

 in this instance, as Preyer builds on it a quite un- 

 tenable hypothesis of the origin of life (see chapter xv.)- 



In the wider sense the word "organic" has long been 

 used in chemistry as an antithesis to inorganic. By 

 organic chemistry is generally understood the chemistry 

 of the compounds of carbon, that element being dis- 

 tinguished from all the others (some seventy-eight in 

 number) by very important properties. It has, in the 

 first place, the property of entering into an immense 

 variety of combinations with other elements, and 

 especially of uniting with oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, 

 and sulphur to form the most complicated albuminoids 

 (see the Riddle, chapter xiv.). Carbon is a biogenetic 

 element of the first importance, as I explained in my 

 carbon-theory in 1866. It might even be called "the 

 creator of the organic world." At first these organo- 

 genetic compounds do not appear in the organism in 

 organized form — that is to say, they are not yet distrib- 

 uted into organs with definite purposes. Such organi- 

 zation is a result, not the cause, of the life-process. 



I have already shown in the fourteenth chapter of the 

 Riddle (and at greater length in the fifteenth chapter of 

 my History of Creation) that the belief in the essential 

 unity of nature, or the monism of the cosmos, is of the 

 greatest importance for our whole system. I gave a 

 very thorough justification of this cosmic monism in 

 1866. In the fifth chapter of the Generelle Morphologie 

 I considered the relation of the organic to the in- 

 organic in every respect, pointing out the differences 

 between them on the one hand, and their points of agree- 

 ment in matter, form, and force on the other. Nageli 

 some time afterwards declared similarly for the unity of 

 nature in his able Mechanisch-physiologische Begrundung 



37 



