Abstract
Introductory. It is exactly forty-five years ago—to the day and hour—that the British Association last met in this city and in this hall to listen to a Presidential Address. The President was the Duke of Buccleuch; the General Secretaries, Francis Galton and T. Archer Hirst; the General Treasurer, William Spottiswoode; and the Assistant General Secretary, George Griffith, who was for many years a mainstay of the Association. The Evening Discourses were delivered by John Tyndall “On Matter and Force,” by Archibald Geikie “On the Geological Origin of the Scenery of Scotland,” and by Alexander Herschel “On the Present State of Knowledge regarding Meteors and Meteorites.” The Presidents of Sections, which were then only seven in number, were for Mathematics and Physics, Sir William Thomson—later to be known as Lord Kelvin; for Chemistry, Thomas Anderson; for Geology, Archibald Geikie, who now as President of the Royal Society worthily fills the foremost place in science within the realm; for Biology, William Sharpey, my own revered master, to whose teaching and influence British physiology largely owes the honourable position which it at present occupies; for Geography, Sir Samuel Baker, the African explorer, who with his intrepid wife was the first to follow the Nile to its exit from the Albert Nyanza; for Economic Science, Mr. Grant Duff; and for Mechanical Science, Professor Rankine.
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Lavie et la mort, English translation by W. J. Greenstreet, igrr, P. 54
G. Quincke, Annal. d. Physik. v. Chem., 1870 and 1888.
The causation not only of movements but of various other manifestations of life by alterations in surface tension of living substance is ably dealt with by A. B. Macallum in a recent article in Asher and Spiro's Ergebnisse der Phjsiologie, 1911. Macallum has described an accumulation of potassium salts at the more active surfaces of the protoplasm of many cells, and correlates this with the production of cell-activity bv the effect of such accumulation upon the surface tension. The literature of the subject will be found in this article.
G. F. Fitzgerald (Brit. Asscc. Reports, 1898, and Scient. Trans. Roy Dublin Society, 1898) arrived at this conclusion with regard to muscle from purely physical considerations.
Vital spontaneity, so readily accepted by persons ignorant of biology, is disproved by the whole history of science. Every vital manifestation is a response to a stimulus, a provoked phenomenon. It is unnecessary to say this is also the case with brute bodies, since that is precisely the foundation of the great principle of the inertia of matter. It is plain that it is also as applicable to living as to inanimate matter. ”Dastre, op. cit., p. 280.
The terms assimilation and disassimilation express the physical and chemical changes which occur within protoplasm as the result of the intake of nutrient material from the circumambient medium and its ultimate transformation into waste products which are passed out again into that medium; the whole cycle of these changes being embraced under the term metabolism.
Leduc (The Mechanism of Life, English translation by W. Deane Butcher, 1911) has given many illustrations of this statement. In the Report of the meeting of 1867 in Dundee is a paper by Dr. J. D. Heaton (On Simulations of Vegetable Growths by Mineral Substances) dealing with the same class of phenomena. The conditions of osmosis in cells have been especially studied by Hamburger (Osmotischer Druck und Ionenlehre, (Wiesbaden, 1902-4).
B. Moore, in Recent Advances in Physiology, 1906; Moore and Roaf, ibid.; and Further Advances in Physiology, 1909 Moore lays especial stress on the transformations of energy which occur in protoplasm. See on the question of vitalism Gley (Rcvue Scientifique, 1911) and D'Arcy Thompson (Address to Section D at Portsmouth, 1911).
The most recent account of the chemistry of protoplasm is that by Botazzi (Das Cytoplasma u. die KörpersÃfte) in Winterstein's Handb. d. vergl. Physiologie, Bd. I., 1912. The literature is given in this article.
It is fair to point out that Dr. Bastian suggests that the formation of ultramicroscopic living particles may precede the appearance of the microscopic organisms which he describes. The Origin of Life, 1911, p. 65.
The present position of the subject is succinctly stated by Dr. Chalmers Mitchell in his article on Abiogenesis in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Dr. Mitchell adds: It may be that in the progress of science it may yet be possible to construct living protoplasm from non-living material. The refutation of abiogenesis has no further bearing on this possibility than to make it probable that if protoplasm ultimately be formed in the laboratory, it will be by a series of steps, the earlier steps being the formation of some substance, or substances. now unknown, which are not protoplasm. Such intermediate stages may have existed in the past. And Huxley in his Presidential Address at Liverpool in 1870 says: But though I cannot express this conviction (i.e., of the impossibility of the occurence of abiogenesis as exemplified by the appearance of organisms in hermeticaliy sealed and sterilised flasks) too strongly, I must carefully guard myself against the supposition that I intend to suggest that no such thing as abiogenesis ever has taken place in the past or ever will take place in the future. With organic chemistry, molecular physics and physiology yet in their infancy and every day making prodigious strides, I think it would be the height of presumption for any man to say that the conditions under which matter assumes the properties we call vital may not, some day, be artificially brought together.
The arguments in favour of this proposition have been arrayed by Meldola in his Herbert Spencer Lecture, 1910, pp. 16–24. Meldola leaves the question open whether such evolution has occurred only in past years or is also taking place now. He concludes that whereas certain carbon compounds have survived by reason of possessing extreme stability, others”the precursors of living matter”survived owing to the possession of extreme lability and adaptability to variable conditions of environment. A similar suggestion was previously made by Lockyer, Inorganic Evolution, 1900, pp. 169, 170.
T. H. Huxley, Presidential Address, 1870; A. B. Macallum, On the Origin of Life on the Globe, in Trans. Canadian Institute, VIII.
First suggested, according to Dastre, by de Salles-Guyon (Dastre, op. cit., p. 252). The theory received the support of Helmholtz.
Worlds in the Making, transl. by H. Borns, chap. viii., p. 221, 1908.
The history of science shows how dangerous it is to brush aside mysteries”i.e., unsolved problems”and to interpose the barrier placarded eternal”no thoroughfare.”R. Meldola, Herbert Spencer Lecture, 1910.
Some authorities, such as Errera, contend, with much probability, that the conditions in interstellar space are such that life, as we understand it, could not possibly exist there.
As Verworn points out, such theories would equally apply to the origin of any other chemical combination, whether inorganic or organic, which is met with on our globe, sp that they lead directly to absurd conclusions.” Allgemeine Physiologie, 1911.
As Meldola insists, this general acceptance was in the first instance largely due to the writings of Herbert Spencer: We are now prepared for evolution in every domain. As in the case of most great generalisations, thought had been moving in this direction for many years. Lamarck and Buffon had suggested a definite mechanism of organic development, Kant and Laplace a principle of celestial evolution, while Lyell had placed geology upon an evolutionary basis. The principle of continuity was beginning to be recognised in physical science. It was Spencer who brought these independent lines of thought to a focus, and who was the first to make any systematic attempt to show that the law of development expressed in its widest and most abstract form was universally followed throughout cosmical processes, inorganic, organic, and super-organic. ”Op. cit., p. 14.
There still exist in fact forms of life which the microscope cannot show us (E. A. Minchin, Presidential Address to Quekett Club, 1911), and germs which are capable of passing through the pores of a Chamberland filter.
Chalmers Mitchell (Article Life, Encycl. Brit., eleventh editions writes as follows: It has been suggested from time to time that condition) very unlike those now existing were necessary for the first appearance of life, and must be repeated if living matter is to be reconstituted artificially. No support for such a view can be derived from observations of the existing conditions of life.
Spontaneous generation of life could only be perceptually demonstrated by rilling in the long terms of a series between the complex forms of inorganic and the simplest forms of organic substance. Were this done, it is quite possible that we should be unable to say (especially considering the vagueness of our definitions of life) where life began or ended.” K. Pearson, Grammar of Science, second edition, 1900, p. 350.
See on the production of elements, W. Crookes, Address to Section B, Brit. Assoc., 1886; T. Preston, Nature, vol. lx., p. 180; J. J. Thomson, Phil. Mag., 1897, p. 311; Norman Lockyer, op. cit., 1900; G. Darwin, Pres. Addr. Brit. Association., 1905.
For arguments in favour of the first appearance of life having been in the sea, see A. B. Macallum, The Palseochemistry of the Ocean, Trans. Canad. Instit., 1903–4.
Lankester (Art. Protozoa, Encycl. Brit., tenth edition) conceives that the first protoplasm fed on the antecedent steps in its own evolution. F. J. Allen (Brit. Assoc. Reports, 1896) comes to the conclusion that living substance is probably constantly being produced, but that this fails to make itself evident owing to the substance being seized and assimilated by existing organisms. He believes that in accounting for the first origin of life on this earth it is not necessary that, as Pflüger assumed, the planet should have been at a form a former period a glowing fire-ball. He prefers to believe that the circumstances which support life would also favour its origin. And elsewhere: Life is not an extraordinary phenomenon, not even an importation from some other sphere, but rather the actual outcome of circumstances on this earth.
The evidence is to be found in F. H. A. Marshall, The Physiology of Reproduction, 1911.
Lord Lister was President at Liverpool in 1896.
This was regarded by Buffon as related to the period of growth, hut the ratio is certainly not constant. The subject is discussed by Ray Lankester in an early work: On Comparative Longevity in Man and Animals, 1870.
The approximate regular periods of longevity of different species of animals furnishes a strong argument against the theory that the decay of old I age is an accidental phenomenon, comparable with disease.
The expectation of life of a healthy man of fifty is still reckoned at about twenty years.
Hominis ævum cæterorum animalium omnium superat præter admodum paucorum.”Francis Bacon, Historia vitæ et mortis, 1637.
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SCHAFER, E. Inaugural Address. Nature 90, 7–19 (1912). https://doi.org/10.1038/090007a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/090007a0
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