HEAT UPON LIVING MATTER, 185 
experiments where we deal with dead organic matter, 
just as it is also applicable to those more primordial 
combinations which first gave birth to living proto- 
plasm on the surface of our Earth. 
Should there be persons still reluctant to accept 
this conclusion, simply because they cannot bring 
themselves to believe in a process of ‘ origin,’ 
concerning the actual steps of which they know 
nothing, one may ask whether it ever occurred to 
them to doubt the fact of the increase in size of 
an elm-tree simply because they were similarly 
unable to know the intimate nature of those nutritive 
processes, by which dead inorganic elements are 
fashioned into its living substance—because in short 
they do not know the secret steps of the process 
by which its ‘growth’ is accomplished ! 
And in reply to those who speak scornfully, 
because of the complexity of some of the organic 
mixtures which have been employed, I would say 
that. my object throughout has been to establish, 
in the first place, the mere fact of the occurrence of 
Archebiosis. And whilst thinking that this could 
be done most easily, if at all, by making use of 
organic mixtures, I also felt sure (for the reasons 
already stated) that it could be dane just as decisively 
with them as with simpler solutions of more definite 
composition. 
