r, to use Professor Moore's term, into "biotic energy"?

III

The inorganic seems dreaming of the organic. Behold its dreams in the
fern and tree forms upon the window pane and upon the stone flagging of
a winter morning! In the Brunonian movement of matter in solution, in
crystallization, in chemical affinity, in polarity, in osmosis, in the
growth of flint or chert nodules, in limestone formations--like seeking
like--in these and in other activities, inert matter seems dreaming of
life.

The chemists have played upon this tendency in the inorganic to parody
or simulate some of the forms of living matter. A noted European
chemist, Dr. Leduc, has produced what he calls "osmotic growths," from
purely unorganized mineral matter--growths in form like seaweed and
polyps and corals and trees. His seeds are fragments of calcium
chloride, and his soil is a solution of the alkaline carbonates,
phosphates, or silicates. When his seeds are sown in these solutions, we
see inert matter germinating, "putting forth bud and stem and root and
branch and leaf and fruit," precisely as in the living vegetable
kingdom. It is not a growth by accretion, as in crystallization, but by
intussusception, as in life. These ghostly things exhibit the phenomena
of circulation and respiration and nutrition, and a crude sort of
reproduction by budding; they repair their injuries, and are able to
perform periodic movements, just as does an animal or a plant; they have
a period of vigorous youthful growth, of old age, of decay, and of
death. In form, in color, in texture, and in cell structure, they
imitate so closely the cell structures of organic growth as to suggest
something uncanny or diabolical. And yet the author of them does not
claim that they are alive. They are not edible, they contain no
protoplasm--no starch or sugar or peptone or fats or carbohydrates.
These chemical creations by Dr. Leduc are still dead matter--dead
colloids--only one remove from crystallization; on the road to life,
fore-runners of life, but not life. If he could set up the
chlorophyllian process in his chemical reactions among inorganic
compounds, the secret of life would be in his hands. But only the green
leaf can produce chlorophyll; and yet, which was first, the leaf or the
chlorophyll?

Professor Czapek is convinced that "some substances must exist in
protoplasm which are directly responsible for the life processes," and
yet the chemists cannot isolate and i