It has the
merit of suggesting a reason why life may not be evolving from
non-life in nature to-day, although it may have so evolved in the
Archaean period.
Other students suggest other combinations of carbon-compounds and
water in the early days. Some suggest that electric action was
probably far more intense in those ages; others think that
quantities of radium may have been left at the surface. But the
most important of these speculations on the origin of life in
early times, and one that has the merit of not assuming any
essentially different conditions then than we find now, is
contained in a recent pronouncement of one of the greatest
organic chemists in Europe, Professor Armstrong. He says that
such great progress has been made in his science--the science of
the chemical processes in living things--that "their cryptic
character seems to have disappeared almost suddenly." On the
strength of this new knowledge of living matter, he ventures to
say that "a series of lucky accidents" could account for the
first formation of living things out of non-living matter in
Archaean times. Indeed, he goes further. He names certain
inorganic substances, and says that the blowing of these into
pools by the wind on the primitive planet would set afoot
chemical combinations which would issue in the production of
living matter.
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