Researches on The Origin and Life-Histories of the Least and Lowest Living Things 1

Abstract

TO all who have familiarised themselves, even cursorily, with modern scientific knowledge, it is well known that the mind encounters the infinite in the contemplation of minute, as well as in the study of vast natural phenomena. The farthest limit we have reached, with the most gigantic standard of measurement we could well employ, in gauging the greatness of the universe, only leaves us with an overwhelming consciousness of the awful greatness—the abyss of the infinite—that lies beyond, and which our minds can never measure. The indefinite has a limit somewhere; but it is not the indefinite, it is the measureless, the infinite, that vast extension forces upon our minds. In like manner, the immeasurable in minuteness is an inevitable mental sequence from the facts and phenomena revealed to us by a study of the minute in nature. The practical divisibility of matter disclosed by modern physics may well arrest and astonish us. But biology, the science which investigates the phenomena of all living things, is in this matter no whit behind. The most universally diffused organism in nature, the least in size with which we are definitely acquainted, is so small that fifty millions of them could lie together in the one-hundredth of an inch square. Vet these definite living things have the power of locomotion, of ingestion, of assimilation, of excretion, and of enormous multiplication, and the material of which the inconceivably minute living speck is made, is a highly complex chemical compound. We dare not attempt a conception of the minuteness of the ultimate atoms that compose the several simple elements that thus mysteriously combine to form the complex substance and properties of this least and lowliest living thing. But if we could even measure these, as a mental necessity, we are urged indefinitely on to a minuteness without conceivable limit, in effect, a minuteness that is beyond all finite measure or conception. So that, as modern physics and optics have enabled us not to conceive merely, but to actually realise, the vastness of spatial extension, side by side with subtle tenuity and extreme divisibility of matter, so the labour, enthusiasm, and perseverance of thirty years, stimulated by the insight of a rare and master mind, and aided by lenses of steadily advancing perfection, has enabled the student of life-forms not simply to become possessed of an inconceivably broader, deeper, and truer knowledge of the great world of visible life, of which he himself is a factor; but also to open up and penetrate into a world of minute living things so ultimately little that we cannot adequately conceive them, which arc, nevertheless, perfect in their adaptations and wonderful in their histories. These organisms, whilst they arc the least, are also the lowliest in Nature, and are to our present capacity totally devoid of what is known as organic structure, even when scrutinised with our most powerful and perfect lenses. Now these organisms lie on the very verge and margin of the vast area of what we know as living. They possess the essential properties of life, but in their most initial state. And their numberless billions, springing every moment into existence wherever putrescence appeared, led to the question, “How do they originate?” Do j they spring up de nova from the highest point on the area of not-life, which they touch? Are they, in short, the direct product of some yet uncorrelated force in nature, changing the dead, the unorganised, the not-living into definite forms of life? Now this, is a profound question, and that it is a difficult one there can be no doubt. But that it is a question for our laboratories is certain. And after careful and prolonged experiment and research the legitimate question to be asked is, Do we find that in our laboratories and in the observed processes of Nature now, that the not-living can be, without the intervention of living things, changed into that which lives?