BOOKS REVIEWED 



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decides how the molecules shall be changed and then distributed in building 

 up two utterly different creatures, the one with fur and the other with 

 feathers ? There is evidently something behind the metabolism which 

 determines all this, and that is Life. 



Again, why have organisms varied, so that the world has become 

 peopled with myriads of different animals and plants, if there be not some- 

 thing which causes the protoplasm and nucleus to build up tissues and 

 organs different from those of the parents in response to new con- 

 ditions of life ? 



To arrive at consciousness, Mr. Burke is " at a loss to find why in 

 these units [assumed to exist in nature] there should not also exist the 

 elements not merely of motion, but also of sensibility and of thought . . . 

 Mind is a property of matter." 



Of course all this and a great deal more is pure a priori assumption, 

 without a shadow of support from observation ; there is an abundance 

 of proof that metabolism of organisms, as well as their variations, are 

 under the guidance of life, as they never take place when the organism 

 is dead. He says, " In fact the division of all nature into biological and 

 a-biological is, strictly speaking, not correct." But this begs the whole 

 question. The author has certainly not given anything like sufficient 

 grounds for saying so. 



When he asserts " biology, although it has reached the theoretical 

 stage, is merely in the hypothetical subdivision of this stage. No general 

 law has yet been found to prevail throughout the science of life," he 

 betrays a want of knowledge of what has been going on in the study of 

 plant-life for the last twenty years. Ecologists have shown that the 

 fundamental law of evolution is self-adaptation to the conditions of life ; 

 while natural selection has nothing to do with the origin of species, as 

 Professor Warming shows and declares in his Lagoa Santa, and Dr. A. 

 Fleischmann in his Die Darwinsche Theorie ; so that biology is now, 

 in fact, an " exact science." 



Though no bacterium has ever been made artificially, yet he says 

 there are " artificial types of vitality." Here again, Mr, Burke assumes 

 that his productions are alive and come into existence " almost as self- 

 made things." But what stands in nature in the place of Mr. Burke or 

 the chemist in the laboratory? These gentlemen were the directors 

 of the matter and forces, and so adjusted them that certain results 

 followed. It is of no value to suggest that " pristine mud might have 

 been a more likely culture medium than fish-broth," nor to say that 

 "radium is the seed which grows in the bouillon soil," leading the 

 reader to imagine radium to be a living thing. 



Coming to his experiments, he wisely disclaims to have produced 

 spontaneous generation or the living from the non-living. When 

 radium-bromide had been put into sterilised bouillon " signs of growth 

 were visible from ultra-microscopic particles, but they do not grow 

 beyond a certain size." The order of their appearances is, first, dots, 

 then single rings, two rings in contact, or two concentric ovals, with 

 a division across the middle. The outer ring, when broad enough, divides 

 into a sort of Maltese cross, which then goes to pieces. 



There is nothing here in the least comparable to a vegetable cell with 



