The story of life's mechanism : a review of the conclusions of modern biology in regard to the mechanism which controls the phenomena of living activity / by H.W. Conn, author of "The story of germ life," etc.

  • Conn, H. W. (Herbert William), 1859-1917
Date:
1899
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The story of life's mechanism : a review of the conclusions of modern biology in regard to the mechanism which controls the phenomena of living activity / by H.W. Conn, author of "The story of germ life," etc. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    quate to the building of machines as well as forces adequate to the formation of chemical compounds and worlds. But here again we are unable to base our explanation upon chemical and physical forces. Reproduction, heredity, and variation are pro- perties of the cell machine, and we are therefore thrown back upon the necessity of explaining the origin of this machine. Can we find a mechanical or chemical explanation of the origin of proto- plasm ? A chemical explanation of the cell is impossible, since it is not a chemical compound, but a piece of mechanism. The explanation given for the origin of animals and plants is also here apparently impossible. The factors upon which that explanation depended are factors of this completed machine itself, and can not be used to explain its origin. We are left at present there- fore without any foundation for further advance. The cells must have had a history of construc- tion, but we do not as yet conceive any forces which may be looked upon as contributing to that history. Whether life phenomena can be manifested by any mixture of compounds sim- pler than the cell we do not yet know. The great problems still remaining for solu- tion, which have hardly been touched by modern biology in all its endeavours to find a mechanical explanation of the living machine, are, therefore, three. First, the relation of mentality to the general phenomena of the correlation of force; second, the intelligible understanding of the mechanism of protoplasm which enables it to guide the blind chemical and physical forces of