The origin of life; being an account of experiments with certain superheated saline solutions in hermetically sealed vessels / by H. Charlton Bastian; with ten plates, containing numerous illustrations from photomicrographs.

  • Bastian, H. Charlton
Date:
1911
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The origin of life; being an account of experiments with certain superheated saline solutions in hermetically sealed vessels / by H. Charlton Bastian; with ten plates, containing numerous illustrations from photomicrographs. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    In this volume a memoir is reproduced on “The Origin of Life Question ” that was submitted early last October to the Royal Society, and which, as I was informed after an interval of a few weeks, was “ not considered suitable for acceptance by the Society.” I desire, therefore, to make a few observations in the first place in reference to the subject of the paper ; and, secondly, in regard to the action of the Society, and the probable causes that have led to such action. Concerning the main question—that of the Origin of Life on this Earth—men of science, or at least a majority of them, no longer appeal to the intervention of any non-natural or miraculous cause. As believers in the Doctrine of Evolution they are content to suppose that at some time after the fiery heat of the crust of our globe had sufficiently cooled to permit of the deposition of water upon its surface, there must have been a further continuance of the physico-chemical processes that had gradually led to the evolution of all the inorganic elements and their compounds from the primal stuff of which the parent-nebula of our solar system was composed. These further physico-chemical processes, whose real nature is unknown, even though their result was the production of what we now know as “living matter,” with all its marvellous qualities and potentialities, could only be regarded as the forging of other and more complicated links in the chain of synthetic processes by which it had been preceded. This must be said, although it is true that with the birth of living matter there is, of course, the origin of what we know as