The origin of life: experiments with superheated saline solutions in hermetically sealed vessels.

  • Bastian, H. Charlton.
Date:
1913
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The origin of life: experiments with superheated saline solutions in hermetically sealed vessels. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by Royal College of Physicians, London. The original may be consulted at Royal College of Physicians, London.

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    Life. But what is Life? From the scientific point of view life is no entity—it is only the summation and aggregated result of all the properties of living matter. This sum-total of properties and potentialities must vary for every particular living thing, in accordance with its complicacy of structure and function, together with its past personal and ancestral history. What has been said indicates sufficiently what is meant by the natural origin of Life, as opposed to its origin by some supernatural or miraculous agency. The question then clearly arises whether such a life-giving process (which I term Archebiosis) occurred only once, or at all events only in the very early days of the Earth's history, or whether it is one that has ever been taking place since the period when it first began. The majority of scientific men seem to favour the former point of view. They appear to think that conditions may have existed in those comparatively early days of the Earth's history more favourable to this life-evolving process than those which have since obtained ; although, of course, their notions as to the actual nature of these primeval conditions must be almost as dim and theoretical as any conceptions to which they may incline con- cerning the actual conditions needful for the occurrence of Archebiosis. Starting points, however, having once been given by means of these early evolutionary processes, all the forms of life that have ever appeared on our globe are now commonly supposed by men of science to have been gradually evolved, by processes of natural selection and otherwise, from such primordial types. Others consider that the life-originating processes may have been many times repeated over many parts of the Earth, though not in recent times.' While a third comparatively small section, ' The consequences of this Polyphyletic doctrine in reference to the course of, and time needed for, organic Evolution, together with the interpretations to be attached to fossil remains from the point of view ot genetic relationship or otherwise, are most important, and would naturally often differ much from those favoured by the Monophyletic doctrine, to which Darwin, Huxley, and so many others, have seemed to incline.