Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 67.djvu/251

Rh has come about and that the question has been rim down to cellular structure and molecular arrangement. It will hardly be gainsaid that a knowledge of the proper conditions for changing forms, functions, habits and motives of living beings will be of priceless value to the race, and this work comes to the twentieth century.

Another piece of work, bringing great surprise among biologists as well as the rest of the thinking world, has been given to us within a year or two, namely, that unfertilized eggs have been made to develop in a normal way by subjecting them to certain inorganic chemical substances, such as magnesium chloride. It has been repeated by so many there is no doubt about it now, but its significance is that life itself is a chemical process and does not necessarily depend upon antecedent life any further than such structure contains chemical combinations of proper sort, and that if these be provided in other ways life and growth will result. This research has no more than begun and we may be on the lookout for surprises. A French biologist reports that if an egg be properly cut into as many as sixteen pieces it will develop into sixteen individuals, differing only in size from the normal individual. This opens out a new field, the philosophical importance of which exceeds its biological importance, as can be seen in a minute's thinking. What the outcome will be no one can tell now, but we may envy the biologists who devote their time to such investigations.

A few years ago two German scientific men discovered that a minute drop of a mixture of oil and a salt of potash acted like a microscopic living thing in several ways. It would move about spontaneously, change its form, had a circulation in itself, would gather to itself particles of other matter in its neighborhood, and was sensitive to stimulus from the outside. It comported itself like a thing of life in all ways but one, it could not reproduce its like. The material itself was called artificial protoplasm. The work is still being investigated, both abroad and at home, with the hypothesis that if the proper chemical constituents can be found and added it will then be a real artificial living thing. As it already possesses four of the five distinguishing characteristics of a living thing, ingenuity and persistence will enable some one to find and endow it with the fifth. It will not be safe for one to predict that this can not be done, for it may be done to-morrow, and the twentieth century starts with a pretty problem considered as a physico-chemical problem but the one who solves it, if it should be done, will have reason to be thankful he is not living in any preceding century, for his life would be made a burden to him, if he was not made a martyr.

I have been told by many good people that this question or that question was quite outside of the domain of science and presumptuous in one to inquire into. Astronomy and geology and chemistry are graciously permitted to be in the hands of the man of science, but life