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Show LIFE STILL HIDES ITS SECRET. Considerably more of interest than of importance seems to attach at-tach to the results attained by Dr. Bertillon, the French biologist, in experimenting with unfertilized frog's eggs. That by the uso of a platinum n.eedle and electric currents he should have started and caused to continue' that segmentation of cells which brings about the development of another animal or plant, would have been sufficiently surprising had the same thing not been accomplished accom-plished several times before in other ways, says the New York Timos-But Timos-But to describe it, as some of the dispatches do, as "Uie artificial production of life" is a manifest error and absurdity. The biologist had "life" in being no less at the beginning than at the end of his research, and of its "artificial production" there was not a trace. In other words, he dul not make a dead nvitter live, which would indeed be' artificial, nor have any of his predecessors prede-cessors in this line of investigation ever done so'. They have merely proved that an attribute or capacity once supposed to be peculiar to unicellular plants and animals that of multiplication by division with no more than mechanical or chemical stimulation is possessed in some degree, and is exercised in some circumstances, by organisms organ-isms more complex. But it is also known at present that this form of propagation does not suffice for even the simplest creatures, and that their survival is due, not to indefinitely continued division, but to occasional coalescence of two cells, with the consequent disappearance disap-pearance of one Tho French biologist's achievement, therefore, belongs to the domain of pure science, so called, not to that of applied or practical science. Of immediate or direct utility it has none at all, but every extension of knowledge of the living cell is full of biological promise. prom-ise. Hidden in seeming simplicity of the cell and in its real complexity com-plexity is the secret of life its origin. There is no reason for assuming that Dr. Bertaillon is any nearer to the solution of that secret because of his triumph with his frog's eggs, but he may be, and at least he is not begging the whole question, as does the great Arrhenius when he asks us to believe in the existence of "zoospores," "zoos-pores," driven to this world from others by the motive power of lieht. |