THE WONDERS OF LIFE 



phenomena proceed on natural principles, organisms, which 

 are formed of and decay into the same matter, must have been 

 derived originally from inorganic compounds. 



This excellent and clear declaration of a distinguished 

 scientist and profound thinker might be taken to heart 

 by the "exact" scientists who are always attacking the 

 monistic theory of archigony as an unproved hypothesis, 

 or regard the whole problem as insoluble. Nageli has, 

 moreover, proceeded to make a thorough study of the 

 molecular processes involved, and embodied the results 

 in his idioplasm theory. He believes that at the be- 

 ginning of organization the definite autonomous ar- 

 rangement of the smallest homogeneous parts of the 

 plasm was a matter of the greatest importance. In his 

 opinion these "micella" are crystalline groups of mole- 

 cules, arranged multifariously in strings and parallel 

 rows. 



A similar and more elaborate attempt to give a physi- 

 cal explanation of the processes of archigony and trace 

 them to mechanical molecular structures was made by 

 Ludwig Zehnder in 1899 in his work on The Origin of 

 Life. He believes that the smallest and lowest life- 

 unities (the micellar strings of Nageli and the biophora 

 of Weismann, corresponding to my plastidules) have a 

 tubular shape, and so he calls them "fistella." He sup- 

 poses that these invisible molecular structures are regu- 

 larly arranged in milUons in the plasma of the cell, and 

 differentiated in such a way that some will effect endos- 

 mosis, others contraction, others the conduction of stim- 

 uli, and so on. As in the similar work of Nageli and 

 others, the value of this molecular hypothesis is that it 

 stimulates us to attempt to conceive the mode of the 

 arrangement and movement of the molecules of plasm 

 in the process of archigony on physical principles. 



A more interesting and notable attempt to penetrate 

 into the mysterious obscurity of the chemical processes 



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