8 PROTOPLASM. 



MR. GROVE ON EXPERIMENTAL ORGANISM. 



MR. GROVE has recently* affirmed that "in a voltaic 

 battery and its effects" we have "the nearest ap- 

 proach man has made to experimental organism :" but surely 

 it should be shown in what particulars a voltaic battery 

 resembles an organism. All organisms come from pre- 

 existing organisms, and all their tissues and organs are formed 

 from or by a little clear, transparent, structureless, moving 

 matter which came from matter like itself, but may increase 

 by appropriating to itself matter having none of its properties 

 or powers. Now, voltaic batteries do not grow or multiply, 

 nor do they evolve themselves out of structureless material, 

 nor, if you give them ever so much pabulum in the shape of 

 the constituents of which they are made, do they appro- 

 priate this. Where too is the chemist who gives what is 

 selected? What then does Mr. Grove mean by asserting 

 that a voltaic battery is the nearest approach man has made 

 to experimental organism ? Has man yet made the slightest 

 approach to experimental organism ? If any apparatus we 

 could contrive developed all possible modes of force 

 motion, heat, light, electricity, magnetism, chemical action, 

 and any number of others yet to be discovered that 

 apparatus would still present no approach whatever to any 

 organism known. Of course such a thing might he called 

 an organism, just as a watch, or water, or a gas, or an 

 elementary substance may be called a creature, or a worm 

 a machine ; but everything that lives every so-called living 



* British Medical Journal, May 29, 1869, p. 486. 



