THE WONDERS OF LIFE 



maintain at all costs the deep gulf between the organic 

 and inorganic worlds. 



Max Verworn, in his General Physiology, has fully de- 

 scribed and criticised the various theories of the appear- 

 ance of life on the earth. He rightly attributes a great 

 value to Pfliiger's cyanogen theory, because "it makes 

 a strictly scientific study of the problem in close rela- 

 tion to the facts of physiological chemistry, and goes 

 thoroughly into detail." He agrees with Pfluger when 

 he expresses himself as follows: "I would say, therefore, 

 that the first albumin to be formed was in point of fact 

 living matter, endued with the property in all its radi- 

 cals of attracting especially homogeneous parts with 

 great force and preference, in order to build them chemi- 

 cally into the molecule, and so grow indefinitely. On 

 this view the living albumin need not have a constant 

 molecular weight, because it is a huge molecule in an 

 unceasing process of formation and decomposition, prob- 

 ably acting on the ordinary chemical molecules as a sun 

 does on a small meteor." This theory, which I believe 

 to be correct, is also maintained by many other modern 

 scientists who have made a particular study of the diffi- 

 cult question of the nature and origin of the albumi- 

 noids. 



Now that we have described the various modern 

 theories of archigony that are worth considering, and 

 recognized with Nageli that the original development 

 of the organic from the inorganic is a fact, we may 

 glance at the older theories which, under the name of 

 "spontaneous generation," afforded matter for a good 

 deal of controversy. It is true that they are now al- 

 most entirely abandoned, but the experiments in con- 

 nection with them excited a good deal of interest and 

 led to many misunderstandings. 



The older hypotheses of "spontaneous generation" 

 do not bear on our problem of archigony (or the first 



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