EVOLUTION.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXXIV, Issue 12, 6 September 1912, Page 5

EVOLUTION.

LIFE a matter of chemical JNILKACj ion. (By Electric Telegraph.—Copyright.) Press Association.) London, September 5. Vt the British Association mooting at Dundee, Professor Schaefer, of Edinburgh, in his pros.dential address, deal in" with the origin of life, said emit, setting aside as devoid of scientific foundation, supernatural intei ventton in the first production of hie, we are compelled to believe that it owed t: S or min to evolution. Life was purely a’matter of chemical interaction Chemists sooner or later would lie able to produce a living substance similar to that wherefrom all existing vital organisms were evolved. Recent iese.irch suggested the probability ot a dividing line between living and nonliving matter, loss sharp than it had hitherto been supposed to be. Lie suggested need for careful search tor t}K-‘°missirig link between the living and dead matter. The ■solution was hopeless if it was true that life was only evolved once. On the subject of death, he disagreed witn McLchniUoti. who held that old-age death was a natural and necessary sequence, even it <Usea.se wore al together dim mated. Certain Fixed colls of the .body must in-ow old and become function leas “ Professor Halliburton said that the address was historic. It might arouse ~ controversy similar to lyndaJi s ami Huxley’s celebrated addresses. Mr.' Caird, a Dundee jute inannlactnrer, has presented the Association with £IO,OOO. „ “The Times” says tnat 1 rofosso. Schaefer, in declaring the problems ot hie are essentially problems of nutter guards himself against crude and 'obsolete materialism by carefully distinguishing between life and the sou