Another consideration, which never appears to trouble the visionaries who propound theories of this sort, is the fact that the inert elements and blind forces of inorganic nature are, if left to themselves, utterly impotent to duplicate even so much as the feats of the chemical laboratory, to say nothing at all of the more wonderful achievements possible only to living organisms. In the laboratory, the physicochemical forces of the mineral world are coördinated, regulated, and directed by the guiding intelligence of the chemist. In that heterogeneous conglomerate, which we call brute matter, no such guiding principle exists, and the only possible automatic results are those which the fortuitous concurrence of blind factors avails to produce. Chance of this kind may vie with art in the production of relatively simple combinations or systems, but where the conditions are as complex as those, which the synthesis of chlorophyll presupposes, chance is impotent and regulation absolutely imperative. How much more is this true, when there is question of the production of an effect so complicatedly telic as the living organism! “I venture to think,” says Sir William Tilden, in a letter to the London _Times_ (Sept. 10, 1912), “that no chemist will be prepared to suggest a process by which, from the interaction of such materials (viz., inorganic substances), anything approaching a substance of the nature of a proteid could be formed or, if by a complex series of changes a compound of this kind were conceivably produced, that it would present the characters of living protoplasm.” In the concluding sentence of his letter, the great chemist seems to deprecate even the discussion of a chemical synthesis of living matter, whether spontaneous or artificial. “Far be it from any man of science,” he says, “to affirm that any given set of phenomena is not a fit subject of inquiry and that there is any limit to what may be revealed in answer to systematic and well-directed investigation. In the present instance, however, it appears to me that this is not a field for the chemist nor one in which chemistry is likely to afford any assistance whatever.” In any case, the idea that a chaos of unassorted elements and undirected forces could succeed where the skill of the chemist fails is preposterous. No known or conceivable process, or group of processes, at work in inorganic nature, is equal to the task. Chance is an explanation only for minds insensible to the beauty and order of organic life.