218 



PROF. G. SIMS WOODHEAD^ M.A., M.D._, 



crude these last few lines have been made to sound by recent 

 discoveries of the physicist, chemist and biologist. 



It is sometimes stated that Sir William Thomson — Lord 

 Kelvin — offered to the British Association his hypothesis of 

 the transference of living matter from other planets to our 

 own, through the agency of meteorites, as a jest ; but (in view 

 of his announced conviction that the impossibility of con- 

 verting lifeless matter into matter endowed with life was as 

 definitely established as the law of gravitation) we must 

 assume that his sense of humour in this case was subordinated 

 to his reason. For this suggestion, sneered at and almost laughed 

 out of court by lesser scientific and philosophical lights, had 

 a surer and more reasonable foundation, and has since been 

 supported by more credible evidence than at that time 

 appeared to be conceivable. Thomson's instincts were truer 

 than other men's reasoned convictions. " Look," they said, " at 

 the nearest of the fixed stars; they are some 22,000,000,000,000 

 miles away. Meteors containing living matter despatched 

 from those stars and travelling at the rate of an express 

 train — sixty miles an hour — would take nearly 42 million 

 years to reach our planet." The thing seemed to be absurd ; 

 living matter capable of germinating at the end of such a 

 journey was inconceivable. " Yes," says Arrhenius, the great 

 physicist, " but my researches on radiant energy enable me 

 to say that living organisms may be transported over that 

 22 billion miles in a trifle of 9,000 years and from Mars to 

 Earth in twenty days ! " But only to come into an atmosphere, 

 between which and a falling meteor the friction is so great and 

 prolonged that the great majority of these meteors are dis- 

 persed in luminous vapour. How would germinal living 

 matter fare, were it to reach the earth's atmosphere unaccom- 

 panied by the meteor ? It was maintained that the 

 intense light and cold to which this living matter would be 

 subjected must exert upon it a profound devitalising effect. 

 But new observations, rendered possible by the use of liquid air 

 in the lowering of temperature, enabled A. McFadyen* to 

 demonstrate that spores of bacteria maintained at a tempera- 

 ture of — 200° C. remain capable of development at the end 

 of a couple of months. Indeed, it is now recognized that 

 whilst on the one hand a rise in temperature accelerates the 

 chemical changes that are associated with the gradual loss of 



* Proc. Roy. Soc. Lond., 1900, vol. Ixvi, pp. 180, 489 ; ibid., 1902, vol. 

 Ixxi, p. 76. 



