AN INTERESTING QUESTION.

Marlborough Express, Volume XXXVI, Issue 146, 25 June 1902, Page 4

AN INTERESTING QUESTION.

At what point does life begin ? So far as regards space or time, the question is unanswerable. Only a few years ago it would have been said that in regard to that seemingly essential condition of life temperature we did know pretty nearly a superior and inferior limit. Little of life is there below the freezing or above the boiling point of water, and far above or below these critical points we should expect even germ life to be destroyed. • When our greatest physicist in 1871 suggested that seeds of plants might have been borne to this world in a far-distant age, the hypothesis seemed incredible, because the temperature of space, being at least as low as minus 140 degrees Centigrade, would be fatal to life in any form. This is not so. Recently at the Jenner Institute bacteria have been frozen in liquid air, and even in liquid hydrogen, and on the applica tion of heat and placed in proper media have germinated. The processes of life were arrested, but tbe nasceut life energy was not destroyed at 200 degrees C, say 300 degrees F., in frost. Experiments are now being made to find whether long cenfinuance for months or years in such cold takes away the vitalism of these lowest forms of life.