e. One of the great problems of the
mechanics of the future is to develop electricity or power directly from
fuel and thus cut out the enormous loss of eighty or ninety per cent
which we now suffer. The growing body does this all the time; life
possesses this secret; the solar energy stored up in fuel suffers no
loss in being transformed into work by the animal mechanism.

Soddy asks whether or not the minute cells of the body may not have the
power of taking advantage of the difference in temperature of the
molecules bombarding them, and thus of utilizing energy that is beyond
the capacity of the machinery of the motor-car. Man can make no machine
that can avail itself of the stores of energy in the uniform temperature
of the earth or air or water, or that can draw upon the potential energy
of the atoms, but it may be that the living cell can do this, and thus a
horse can pull more than a one-horse-power engine. Soddy makes the
suggestive inquiry: "If life begins in a single cell, does intelligence?
does the physical distinction between living and dead matter begin in
the jostling molecular crowd? Inanimate molecules, in all their
movements, obey the law of probability, the law which governs the
successive falls of a true die. In the presence of a rudimentary
intelligence, do they still follow that law, or do they now obey another
law--the law of a die that is loaded?" In a machine the energy of fuel
has first to be converted into heat before it is available, but in a
living machine the chemical energy of food undergoes direct
transformation into work, and the wasteful heat-process is cut off.

VI

Professor Soddy, in discussing the relation of life to energy, does not
commit himself to the theory of the vitalistic or non-mechanical origin
of life, but makes the significant statement that there is a consensus
of opinion that the life processes are not bound by the second law of
thermo-dynamics, namely, the law of the non-availability of the energy
latent in low temperatures, or in the chaotic movements of molecules
everywhere around us. To get energy, one must have a fall or an incline
of some sort, as of water from a higher to a lower level, or of
temperature from a higher to a lower degree, or of electricity from one
condition of high stress to another less so. But the living machine
seems able to dispense with this break or incline, or else has the
secret of creating one for itself.

In the living body the che