Loeb--all he did was to restate destiny, one of humanity's oldest ideas, in the terms of tropisms, infusoria and light.

Omar Khayyam chemically reincarnated in the Rockefeller Institute.

Nevertheless those who accept his theories have to admit that there is essentially no difference between their impulses and the rush of filings toward a magnet.
"Equally nevertheless, Goodwin, the iron does meet Haeckel's three tests--it can receive a stimulus, it does react to that stimulus and it retains memory of it; for even after the current has ceased it remains changed in tensile strength, conductivity and other qualities that were modified by the passage of that current; and as time passes this memory fades.

Precisely as some human experience increases wariness, caution, which keying up of qualities remains with us after the experience has passed, and fades away in the ratio of our sensitivity plus retentiveness divided by the time elapsing from the original experience--exactly as it is in the iron." * Professor Jacques Loeb, of the Rockefeller Institute, New York, "The Mechanistic Conception of Life.".