Untitled

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LV, Issue 142, 2 November 1912, Page 4

LIFE ORIGINS. The discussion initiated by Professor Schafer in his reeenr, address upon the origin of life is still proceeding in the Mother Country and has spread to Europe and America. The layman (says the Lyttelton Times) cannot be expected to follow the scientists through the mazes of atomic theories and pschological manifestations; indeed, there is some reason to believe that the learned gentlemen are not understanding one another very clearly. But it is a revelation to many people to discover how intense thought and untiring study are being ■devoted to the problem of life origins in the inner circles of the scientific world. Scores of highly-trained minds are concentrated upon the mysteries of the germ-plasm, the minute scrap of matter that contains within itself all the infinite possibilities associated with the phenomena of heredity. The phsyiologists and the physicists form two schools of thought divided at present by a wide gulf. The physiologists talk of plasm and bacteria and seek for a connecting link between the animate and the inanimate in the field that is revealed by their microscopes. The psysicists deal with molecules, atoms "Dac'k to the primal ether, where the infinitely small is Infinitely divisible. ' Perhaps the two groups will find common ground some day, but it is not obvious that they will be much nearer then to the solution of their problem. They may trace the train of effects to the limits of the knowable •without finding the cause, and as Professor Schafer has admitted it is the cause that mankind yearns to know. The scientists are not tampering with the foundations of faith.