THE LIVING ORGANISM 29 



properties of protoplasm are due to any other causes 

 than those which may be found in the chemical and 

 physical constitution of protoplasm? In brief, is life 

 physics and chemistry? Nowadays the majority of 

 biologists believe that it is. Just as the properties 

 of water are contributed by the elements hydrogen and 

 oxygen which unite to form it, just so the marvelous 

 properties of protoplasm are regarded as the inevitable 

 derivatives of the combined properties of the various 

 chemical elements which constitute protoplasm. Biolo- 

 gists have known for more than a century, since the 

 work of Lavoisier and Laplace in 1780, that the funda- 

 mental process of the living mechanism is oxidation, 

 and that this process is the same, as they said, for the 

 burning candle and the guinea pig. Beginning with 

 Woehler, in 1828, scores of students of physiological 

 chemistry have duplicated the chemical processes of 

 living matter, which were regarded as so peculiar to the 

 living organism that they seemed to be due to the oper- 

 ation of a non-mechanical and vital cause. The inves- 

 tigator mentioned was the first to construct artificially 

 from inorganic substances the nitrogen-containing 

 ash product of the living organism called urea. Now 

 hundreds of so-called organic compounds have been 

 made synthetically and their number is added to week 

 after week. Therefore, the biologist who finds that a 

 physical and chemical analysis of some vital processes 

 is possible, and that the analysis is being extended 

 with astonishing rapidity, finds himself unable to 

 regard protoplasmic activity as anything different in 

 kind or category from the processes of physics and 

 chemistry which go on in the world of dead things. 



