PHYSICAL BASIS OF LIFE. 



influences" the one thing is easily converted into the other, 

 and not by such nonsensical fictions as "vitality," which 

 can neither be weighed, measured, nor conceived. 



Some among those who work at and think over these 

 matters doubt if many of Prof. Huxley's assertions are at all 

 justified by his facts unless indeed he has new facts of 

 high importance which have not yet been brought for- 

 ward and many are unable to accept arguments which by 

 him seem to have been considered quite conclusive. I 

 shall therefore venture to draw attention to some of the views 

 he has recently expressed in his paper, " On the physi- 

 cal basis of life," published in the Fortnightly Review F , 

 February ist, 1869. 



PROTOPLASM. 



The term "Protoplasm" is now applied to several dif- 

 ferent kinds of matter, to substances differing from one 

 another in the most essential particulars. It seems, there- 

 fore, very desirable that its meaning should be accurately 

 defined by those who employ it, or that it should be super- 

 seded by other words. If certain authorities were asked 

 to define exactly the characters of the matter which they 

 called protoplasm, we should have from those authors defi- 

 nitions applying to things essentially different from one 

 another. Hard and soft, solid and liquid, coloured and 

 colourless, opaque and transparent, granular and destitute 

 of granules, structureless and having structure, moving and 

 incapable of movement, active and passive, contractile and 

 non-contractile, growing and incapable of growth, changing 



