Abstract
IT may not perhaps be irrelevant to point out that even were it permissible to assert—as Prof. Fitzgerald conclusively shows that it is not—that because certain natural processes do not under actual conditions reverse, therefore they are irreversible, the examples of irreversibility in nature, on which Prof. Ostwald founds his “fourth attack” on the mechanical theory, are singularly ill-chosen. He directs us to the life-histories of organisms, these life-histories themselves being but a very brief portion of the indefinitely long series of transformations which the matter for that short time identified with them is going through. Yet even within this narrow range reversible actions are to be found. Surely all metabolic processes must be regarded as such. Moreover at this very moment there may quite possibly be built into our own bodily tissues, matter which some generations ago entered into the physical composition of our ancestors, has since been degraded from the rank of organic substances altogether, and is now through new-old combinations and re-combinations once more raised to its former position and forms part of a living organism. If this can come to pass, vital phenomena are clearly not irreversible. It may take much more than the lifetime of a man or of a tree for the whole cycle of operations to be complete; but when it is complete, we have as fair an example of a reversible series as we are likely to find in nature.
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C., E. Ostwald's Energetics. Nature 53, 487 (1896). https://doi.org/10.1038/053487b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/053487b0
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