president’s address. 
491 
You will observe that Prof. Loeb really requires the egg before he 
•can fertilize it, but another scientific man, Dr. Houghton, comes for- 
ward with what is an interesting assurance. If he cannot produce the 
egg he can the cell from which in time an egg may be developed. One 
of the lowest and Simplest forms of life is what is known to the man 
of science as the amoeba. A popular writer upon the subject says : 
“ It is composed of a single cell in a jelly-like substance. It is with- 
out organs of any kind. When it wants something to eat, it extends 
the part of its body nearest its food, in the form of a finger, draws in 
the food and proceeds to absorb it. When the time comes for the 
baby amcebas, the parent, if such it might be called, literally divides 
up its body, and each part becomes an independent am(cba, to be 
divided again when the time comes. What Dr. Houghton claims is 
that he has produced and can produce from crystals, or dead matter, 
bodies that closely resemble the amoeba. These artificially created 
bodies move just like theamreba ; they absorb their food as the anueba 
does ; they show the same chemical qualities, and they make a brave 
attempt at reproduction by splitting up into different cells, each dis- 
playing the same qualities as the mother cell. But there they stop. 
While the progeny of the real ammba keeps on dividing and sub-divid- 
ing interminably, the artificial amoeba fails after the first division, and 
in a time, varying from half an hour to three weeks, becomes a dead 
mass.” 
If, however, life can be produced artificially from mere matter 
which will live through two generations what may not yet result along 
this line 1 and if it can be shown that by chemical combinations a 
living creation can be made, it is an easy generalization that out of 
this earth, once a gaseous mass, out of conditions entirely azoic, came 
the combinations which gave us the primal cell, and that evolution 
and development have done the rest. But this is proceeding too far, 
just now. We must be content with what we know, while we go on 
the search for new facts. Patiently, slowly, even with toil, must we 
accumulate information ; and as by finding out things we add to the 
available state of knowledge we increase our satisfaction at the con- 
templation of the simplicity and the harmony of nature when we 
thoroughly understand her methods, and to some extent, perhaps, her 
purposes. 
