since that peas sown in pure sand, moistened with distilled water and fed by the air, obtained all the carbon necessary for their development, flowering, and fructification. Here we see a plant which not only maintains its vigor on these few substances, but grows until it has increased a millionfold or a million-millionfold the quantity of protoplasm it originally possessed, and this protoplasm exhibits the phenomena of life. This and other proof led M. Dumas to say: "From the loftiest point of view, and in connection with the physics of the globe, it would be imperative on us to say that in so far as their truly organic elements are concerned, plants and animals are the offspring of the air."

Schleiden,[8] speaking of the haymakers of Switzerland and the Tyrol, says: "He mows his definite amount of grass every year on the Alps, inaccessible to cattle, and gives not back the smallest quantity of organic substance to the soil. Whence comes the hay, if not from the atmosphere."

It has been seen, then, that plants can manufacture protoplasm, a faculty which animals are not possessed of; they at best can only convert dead protoplasm into living protoplasm. Thus when vegetable or meat is cooked their protoplasm dies, but is not rendered incompetent of resuming its old functions as a matter of life. "If I," says Huxley, "should eat a piece of cooked mutton, which was once the living protoplasm of a sheep, the protoplasm, rendered dead by cooking, will be changed into living protoplasm, and thus I would transubstantiate sheep into man; and were I to return to my own place by sea and undergo shipwreck, the crustacean might and probably would return the compliment, and demonstrate our common nature by turning my protoplasm into living lobster." As has been said before, where there are life manifestations there is protoplasm. Life is regarded by one class of thinkers as the principle or cause of organization; and according to the other, life is the product or effect of organization. We must, however, agree with Professor Orton, who says: "Life is the effect of organization, not the result of it. Animals do not live because they are organized, but are organized because they are alive." In whatever way it is looked at, life is but a forced condition. "The more advanced thinkers, then, in science to-day," says Barker, "therefore look upon the life of the living form as inseparable from its substance, and believe that the former is purely phenomenal and only a manifestation of the latter. During the existence of a special force as such, they retain the term only to express the sum of the phenomena of living beings. The word life must be regarded, then, as only a generalized expression signifying the sum-total of the properties of matter possessing such organization."

In what manner, then, does this matter, possessing the phenomena of life, differ from inorganic matter, or in what manner does living matter differ from matter not living? The forces which are at work on the one side are at work on the other. The phenomena of life are all dependent upon the working of the same physical and chemical forces as those which are active in the rest of the world. It may be convenient to use the terms "vitality" and "vital force" to denote the cause of certain groups of natural operations, as we employ the names of "electricity" and "electrical force" to denote others; but it ceases to do so, if such a name implies the absurd assumption that either "electricity" or "vitality" is an entity, playing the part of a sufficient cause of electrical or vital phenomena. A mass of living protoplasm is simply a machine of great complexity, the total result of the work of which, or its vital phenomena, depend on the one hand upon its construction, and on the other upon the energy supplied to it; and to speak of "vitality" as anything but the names of a series of operations is as if one should talk of the "horologity" of a clock.[9]

When hydrogen and oxygen are united by an electrical spark water is produced; certainly there is no parity between the liquid produced and the two gases. At 32° F., oxygen and hydrogen are elastic gaseous bodies, whose particles tend to fly away from one another; water at the same temperature is a strong though brittle solid. Such changes are called the properties of water. It is not assumed that a certain something called "acquosity" has entered into and taken possession of the oxide of hydrogen as soon as formed, and then guarded the particles in the facets of the crystal or amongst the leaflets of the hoar-frost. On the contrary, it is hoped molecular physics will in time explain the phenomena. "What better philosophical status," says Huxley,[10] "has vitality than acquosity. If the properties of water may be properly said to result from the nature and disposition of its molecules, I can find no intelligible ground for refusing to say that the properties of protoplasm result from the nature and disposition of its molecules."

"To distinguish the living from the dead body," Herbert Spencer says, "the tree that puts out leaves when the spring brings change of temperature, the flower which opens and closes with the rising and setting of the sun, the plant that droops when the soil is dry and re-erects itself when watered, are considered alive because of these produced changes; in common with the zoophyte, which contracts on the passing of a cloud over the sun, the worm that comes to the ground when continually shaken, and the hedgehog which rolls itself up when attacked."

"Seeds of wheat produced antecedent to the Pharaohs," says Bastain,[11] "remaining in Egyptian catacombs through century after century display of course no vital manifestations, but nevertheless retain the potentiality of growing into perfect plants whenever they may be brought into contact with suitable external conditions. We must presume that either (1) during this long lapse of centuries the 'vital principle' of the plant has been imprisoned in the most dreary and impenetrable of dungeons, whither no sister effluence from the general 'soul of nature' could affect it; or else (2) that the germ of the future living plant is there only in the form of an inherited structure, whose molecular complexities are of such a kind that, after moisture has restored mobility to its atoms, its potential life may pass into actual life. Some of the lowest forms of animals and plants have such a tenacity to life that their vital manifestation may be kept in abeyance for five, ten, fifteen, or even twenty years. Though not living any more than the wheat, they also retain the potentiality of manifestation of life; and for each alike, in order that this potentiality may pass into actuality, the first requisition is water with which to restore them to that possibility of molecular rearrangement under the influence of incident forces, of which the absence of water had deprived them, and without which, life in any real sense is impossible."

ANALYSIS OF A MAN.

(By Prof. Miller.)

A man 5 feet 8 inches high, weighing 154 pounds.