Biologists have known for more than a century, since the work of Lavoisier
and Laplace in 1780, that the fundamental process of the living mechanism
is oxidation, and that this process is the same, as they said, for the
burning candle and the guinea pig. Beginning with Woehler, in 1828, scores
of students of physiological chemistry have duplicated the chemical
processes of living matter, which were regarded as so peculiar to the
living organism that they seemed to be due to the operation of a
non-mechanical and vital cause. The investigator mentioned was the first to
construct artificially from inorganic substances the nitrogen-containing
ash product of the living organism called urea. Now hundreds of so-called
organic compounds have been made synthetically and their number is added
to week after week. Therefore, the biologist who finds that a physical and
chemical analysis of some vital processes is possible, and that the
analysis is being extended with astonishing rapidity, finds himself unable
to regard protoplasmic activity as anything different in kind or category
from the processes of physics and chemistry which go on in the world of
dead things.
It is true that even at the present time some biologists are reluctant to
accept the thoroughgoing mechanical interpretation of organic phenomena,
partly because these are so complex that their ultimate constituents
cannot be discerned, but more often on account of the apparently
purposeful nature of biological processes.
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