THE ORIGIN OF LIFE 



tion, is a purely chemical (or, in the wider sense, physi- 

 cal) process, and that there is no question of a specific 

 vital force or a mystic constructor (like the famous 

 "mechanical engineer of life"), or any other tran- 

 scendental agency, in connection with it. The tiny 

 chemical laboratory in which this remarkable organo- 

 plastic process takes place under the influence of sun- 

 light is, in the simplest plants, the chromacea, either 

 the whole homogeneous globule of plasm (chroococcus) 

 or its bluish-green surface-layer, which is active as a 

 chromatic principle (chromatophore) . But in most 

 plants these reduction-laboratories are the chromatella 

 or chromatophora, which have been differentiated from 

 the rest of the plasm of the cell, and are colorless globu- 

 lar leucoplasts within its dark interior, or green chromo- 

 plasts (or granules of chlorophyll) at its illumined sur- 

 face. My theory of archigony only assumes that this 

 chemical process of plasmodomism which we find re- 

 peated every second in every plant-cell exposed to the 

 sunlight, and which has become an "inherited habit" 

 of the green plant - cell, developed of itself at the be- 

 ginning of organic life; in other words, it is a catalytic 

 process (or one analogous to catalysis), the physical 

 and chemical conditions of which were present in the 

 condition of organic nature at that time. 



My hypothesis was very strongly confirmed twenty 

 years ago by the adhesion of the able botanist, Carl 

 Nageli. In his instructive work, A Mechanical-physio- 

 logical Theory of Evolution (1884), he supported all the 

 principal ideas as to the natural origin of life which I had 

 advanced in 1866. He formulates the chief part of 

 them in this admirable principle: 



The origin of the organic from the inorganic is, in the first 

 place, not a question of experience and experiment, but a fact 

 deduced from the law of the constancy of matter and force. 

 If all things in the material world are causally related, if all 



343 



