Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 45.djvu/550

532 detail, by the production of facts undermining their experiments, hut which did not touch the foundation of their doctrine. No one will ever cause to appear in a vial, by combining all imaginable elements, a microscopic animal or plant, however simple, with a definite configuration, because that requires duration of existence behind it. The problem to be solved is not there. The necessary thing is to create that unknown molecular movement which alone constitutes life and which brings on all the rest.

At the present time chemists seem to be on the point of obtaining by synthesis substances similar to those of which some of the important parts of animals and plants are made; but we must not nourish a chimerical hope too rapidly. There is a chasm between the end almost reached by M. Schützenberger and others, and the creation of the smallest parcel of living matter. One may make albumin like that of an egg, fibrin like that of the blood, but he will still have inert substances, as they are. The white of an egg is not living, although it emanated from a living being, no more than the shell and the greater part of the yolk. It is simply a secretion—an outthrow of the living flesh of the hen—and which acquires from it nothing more than a composition nearly identical with it, and in any case extremely complex. Hence the difficulty of reproducing artificially a similar body by the synthesis of the very numerous chemical elements that compose its delicate structure. Every molecule must be there and in its place. Even when this synthesis has been performed in his retorts, has the chemist produced life? Not at all! He will be like Prometheus in the face of his clay statue; the fire from heaven will be wanting—the living fire. That albumin, that fibrin, the issue of the combination of any number whatever of the different elements that should compose it, remain inert substances.

Yet the thought of producing living matter does not seem entirely hopeless. The conditions have already necessarily been realized on the planet, and perhaps many times. It is not impossible that at the bottom of the ocean or in stagnant waters sarcodic masses are still taking spontaneous birth. We have no evidence of it, but such a phenomenon does not appear liable to the fundamental objection. How shall we surprise this beginning of life? If science shall ever succeed in achieving this great work in its laboratories it will have accomplished the desire of the first man of the Mosaic legend. We shall know what life and death are. The dream of the heterogenists will be realized, and man will indeed have created life.—Translated for The Popular Science Monthly from the Revue des Deux Mondes.