Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 62.djvu/37

Rh Let me take as an example the subject of osmosis. The laws which regulate this phenomenon through dead membranes are fairly well known and can be experimentally verified; but in the living body there is some other manifestation of force which operates in such a way as to neutralize the known force of osmosis. Is it necessary to suppose that this force is a new one? May it not rather be that our much vaunted knowledge of osmosis is not yet complete? It is quite easy to understand why a dead and a living membrane should behave differently in relation to substances that are passing through them. The molecules of the dead membrane are, comparatively speaking, passive and stable; the molecules in a membrane made of living cells are in a constant state of chemical integration and disintegration; they are the most unstable molecules we know. It is to be expected that such molecules would allow water, or substances dissolved in water, to pass between them and remain entirely inactive? The probability appears to me to be all the other way; the substances passing, or attempting to pass, between the molecules will be called upon to participate in the chemical activities of the molecules themselves, and in the building up and breaking down of the compounds so formed there will be a transformation of chemical energy and a liberation of what looks like a new force. Before a physicist decides that his knowledge of osmosis is final, let him attempt to make a membrane of some material which is in a state of unstable chemical equilibrium, a state in some way comparable to what is called metabolism in living protoplasm. I cannot conceive that such a task is insuperable, and when accomplished, and the behavior of such a membrane in an osmometer or dialyser is studied, I am convinced that we shall find that the laws of osmosis as formulated for such dead substances as we have hitherto used will be found to require revision.

Such an attitude in reference to vital problems appears to be infinitely preferable to that which too many adopt of passive content, saying the phenomenon is vital and there is an end of it.

When a scientific man says this or that vital phenomenon cannot be explained by the laws of chemistry and physics, and therefore must be regulated by laws of some other nature, he most unjustifiably assumes that the laws of chemistry and physics have all been discovered. He forgets, for instance, that such an important detail as the constitution of the proteid molecule has still to be made out.

The recent history of science gives an emphatic denial to such a supposition. All my listeners have within the last few years seen the discovery of the Röntgen rays and the modern development of wireless telegraphy. On the chemical side we have witnessed the discovery of new elements in the atmosphere and the introduction of an entirely new branch of chemistry called physical chemistry. With such examples