iSogal Institution o( Creat Britain* 



WEEKLY EVENING MEETING, 



Friday, April 8, 1859. 



Sir Henbt Holland, Bart. M.D. F.R.S. in the Chair. 



James Paget, Esq. F.E.S. 

 On the Chronometry of Life, 



The design of the discourse was, to illustrate the law that the processes 

 of organic life are regulated with a regard to time, as exact as that 

 which is observed by them in respect of size and weight and quantity 

 of material employed in them ; and to show that such an observance 

 of time is characteristic of life, depending essentially on properties 

 inherent in the living bodies themselves, and not on conditions external 

 to them. 



Laws indicating the limitation of the organic formative processes, 

 in respect of quantity, are evident in the facts that, in the ordinary 

 conditions in which each living being is found, it and all its parts have 

 appropriate size and weight and mutual proportion. These may, 

 indeed, be modified by the variations of external conditions, or by 

 events that are of the nature of accidents : but the range of possible 

 variations is, in nearly all cases, comparatively narrow ; and the 

 boundaries are soon reached, in which changes of external conditions 

 become incompatible with life. 



An instance of a corresponding limitation of the organic processes 

 in regard to time might be noted in the natural duration of each 

 creature's life. It is, indeed, not possible to assign any exact number 

 of hours, days, or years, as the constant limit of life in any species ; 

 but it is enough to prove a law of time, as limiting the total duration 

 of the organic processes in each, when we see that, in man, and in 

 other species, the length of life, when not diminished by disease or 

 violence, is as fixed as the natural weight or stature is, and that the 

 term of life is marked by changes whose source is inherent in the living 

 body. Watching these changes in the senile degenerations of the 

 human body, it is evident that life does not cease, naturally, because 

 of any change in the external conditions of living ; and that the body 

 is not, with advancing years, gradually worn out, as if there were a 

 gradual consumption of a store of material or of force ; but that, as, at 

 a set time, the development of the body ceases and growth goes on, 

 YoL. III. (No. 30.) it 



