Evolution / by Patrick Geddes and J. Arthur Thomson.

  • Patrick Geddes
Date:
[1911?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Evolution / by Patrick Geddes and J. Arthur Thomson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    78/264 (page 74)
    Characteristic Features of Living Creatures.—The chemists tell us that the physical basis of life always includes proteids and similar highly complex substances, and that the process of living involves an intricate series of combustions and fermentations and reconstructions, many of which can be imitated outside the body altogether and expressed in chemical formulae. On the other hand we cannot give a chemical description of any complete vital function, or of any activity of the living creature as a whole— and unless, as the Germans say, we throw away the baby with the bath, we cannot ignore the most salient fact, that all the manifold chemical processes are correlated and controlled in a unified behaviour, in a purposive agency. Even the amoeba is no fool. The physicists tell us that the living creature resembles some wonderful kind of engine; it is a material system adapted to transform matter and energy; and it illustrates in its living a number of well-known physical pheno¬ mena, of surface-tension, of diffusion, of elasticity, of hydrostatics, of thermodynamics, of electricity, and so on. At the same time it has to be admitted that not even the simplest vital activity, such as the passage