The modern functional counterparts of T [template], T, and C1 [catalyst] [long dash]C2 are easily recognized as DNA, RNA, and protein enzymes; this analogy is limited, however. C1[long dash]C2 is polymerized by a simple transcription from the template T, and can have no greater variety of residues than exists in T. If T is made from 4 kinds of monomers, as is a modern ribonucleic acid, then C1-C2 cannot be made from 20 kinds of monomers as is a modern protein, and vice versa. It follows that Stage VI catalysts are not like modern proteins, or that its templates are not like modern nucleic acids. But there is little reason to expect any such similarity of composition. Stage VI requires that certain monomer molecules occurred which, when arranged in appropriate sequences, would confer on their polymers a particular set of properties. The further coincidence that those same monomers be used now to make nucleic acids and proteins should not be expected. Whatever their composition, the auto-catalysts of Stages V and VI meet the minimum criteria for life, they have metabolism, are self-reproducing, are able to mutate randomly and to reproduce in the new form, and they are able to influence the environment in such a way as to insure a supply of materials necessary for perpetuation of the system. As a scientific theory, this scheme has the observational disadvantage that Stage I arises through chance occurrences in a system that, for its immensity of duration and extension, cannot be duplicated in the laboratory. Wald (1954) stated the possibility that the origin of life may have depended upon events too infrequent to be readily repeated in the laboratory, yet frequent enough to be nearly inevitable in the geological scales of time and space. This distinction between laboratory and geological systems may imply that the events in question could be specified by an amount of information of the order of 102 bits, the same order as the information content envisioned for the State I polymer. However, the initial formation of the "threshold," in this case Stage I, is deemed to be an untestable hypothesis. The Stage I polymer is structurally much simpler than most of the thresholds that were proposed before; also, its initial polymerization is to be considered not as a single rare event, but as a particular of simple reactions, all of which could be studied in the laboratory. Thus, if there was a reliable estimate of conditions on the primordial earth, and if, through experiment, the chemical structure of a polymer that could function as Stage I in such a place was discovered, then, the probability that at least one molecule of the polymer would be formed there could be estimated. A figure near unity would provide confirmation for any theory of the origin of life.