110       MOLECULAR  DISSYMMETRY  OF  ORGANIC  PRODUCTS. 
even  a  suspicion,  of  possible  differences  between  these  bodies. 
It  is,  indeed,  many  years  since  I  recognised  these  identities 
and  these  differences. 
It  was  then  impossible  for  me  to  understand  how  nature  could 
make  a  right  body,  without  making  at  the  same  time  a  left  body. 
For  the  same  forces  which  are  in  play  at  the  moment  of  the 
elaboration  of  the  molecule  of  right  tartaric  acid,  ought,  it  seems, 
to  give  a  left  molecule,  and  there  should  be  only  paratartaries. 
Why  even  rights  or  lefts  ?  Why  not,  only  non-dissymmetrics, 
substances  of  the  order  of  those  of  inorganic  nature  ? 
There  are  evidently  causes  for  these  curious  manifestations  of 
the  play  of  molecular  forces.  To  indicate  them  in  a  precise 
manner,  would  be  certainly  very  difficult.  But  I  do  not  believe 
I  am  mistaken  in  saying  that  we  know  one  of  their  essential 
characters.  Is  it  not  necessary  and  sufficient  to  admit  that,  at 
the  moment  of  the  elaboration  in  the  vegetable  organism  of 
immediate  principles,  a  dissymmetric  force  is  present?  For  we 
have  just  seen  there  was  but  a  single  case  in  which  the  right 
molecules  differed  from  their  left,  the  case  in  which  they  are 
submitted  to  actions  of  a  dissymmetric  order. 
May  these  dissymmetric  actions,  placed  perhaps  under  cosmic 
influences,  reside  in  light,  in  electricity,  in  magnetism,  in  heat? 
Are  they  in  relation  with  the  motion  of  the  earth,  with  the  elec- 
tric currents  by  which  physicists  explain  the  terrestrial  magnetic 
poles  ?  It  is  not  even  possible,  at  the  present  time,  to  emit  the 
smallest  conjectures  in  this  respect. 
But  I  regard  as  necessary  the  conclusion,  that  dissymmetric 
forces  exist  at  the  moment  of  elaboration  of  natural  organic 
products,  forces  which  would  be  absent  or  without  effect  in  the 
re-actions  of  our  laboratories,  either  on  account  of  the  sudden 
action  of  these  phenomena,  or  on  account  of  some  other  unknown 
circumstance. 
XII. 
We  come  to  the  last  experiment,  the  interest  of  which  does 
not  yield  to  any  of  those  which  precede,  in  the  proof  which  it 
will  manifestly  afford  us  of  the  influence  of  dissymmetry  on  the 
phenomena  of  life.  We  have  just  seen  dissymmetry  intervene 
as  a  modifier  of  chemical  affinities  ;  but  it  dealt  with  re-actions 
