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life of the elements or elementary life, all the same? Is there a sum total of characteristics which may define life in general?
The physiologists, following in the steps of Claude Bernard, respond in the affirmative. They accept as valid and convincing the proof given of this vital community by the illustrious experimentalist. However there are some rare exceptions to this universal assent. In this concert of approval there is at least one discordant voice, that of M. F. Le Dantec.[1]
- ↑ M. Le Dantec, of whose philosophical and rigorously systematic mind I have the highest opinion, has laid down a new conception of life, the essential basis of which is this very distinction between elementary life and ordinary life; between the life of the elements or of the beings formed from a single cell, protophytes and protozoa, and the life of ordinary animals and plants, which are multicellular complexes, and for that reason called metazoa and metaphytes. Further, in the elementary life peculiar to monocellular beings (protozoa and cellular elements), M. Le Dantec distinguishes three manners of being:—The first condition, which is elementary life manifested in all its perfection, cellular health; the second condition is deteriorated elementary life, cellular disease; and the third condition, which is latent life. I should say at once that in so far as the fundamental distinction of the phenomena of elementary life and those of the general life of animals and ordinary plants, metazoa or metaphytes is concerned, we find it neither justified nor useful. And further, manifested elementary life, as M. Le Dantec understands it, would only belong to a small number of elementary beings—for the protozoa, starting with the infusoria, are not among the number—and to a still smaller number of anatomical elements, since among the vertebrates we recognize as almost the only elements satisfying it, the ovule, and perhaps the leucocyte. Physiologists, therefore, do not agree with M. Le Dantec as to the utility of adding one condition more to those we all admit—namely, manifested animal life and latent life.
