292 ON THE INTERNAL FORM [ch. 



structure*." The normal muscle-cell is something which turns 

 energy, derived from oxidation, into work; it is a mechanism which 

 arrests and utihses the chemical energy of oxidation in its downward 

 course; but the same cell when injured or disintegrated loses its 

 "usefulness," and sets free a greatly increased proportion of its 

 energy in the form of heat. It was a saying of Faraday's, that 

 "even a Hfe is but a chemical act prolonged. If death occur, the 

 more rapidly oxygen and the affinities run on to their final state f." 

 Very great and wonderful things are done by means of a 

 mechanism (whether natural or artificial) of extreme simphcity. 

 A pool of water, by virtue of its surface, is an admirable mechanism 

 for the making of waves ; with a lump of ice in it, it becomes an 

 efficient and self-contained mechanism for the making of currents. 

 Music itself is made of simple things — a reed, a pipe, a string. 

 The great cosmic mechanisms are stupendous in their simphcity; 

 and, in point of fact, every great or little aggregate of heterogeneous 

 matter (not identical in "phase") involves, ipso facto, the essentials 

 of a mechanism. Even a non-living colloid, from its intrinsic hetero- 

 geneity, is in this sense a mechanism, and one in which energy is 

 manifested in the movement and ceaseless rearrangement of the 

 constituent particles. For this reason Graham speaks somewhere 

 or other of the colloid state as "the dynamic state of matter"; in 

 the same philosopher's' phrase, it possesses ^' energia%.'^ 



Let us turn then to consider, briefly and diagrammatically, the 

 structure of the cell, a fertilised germ-cell or ovum for instance, not 

 in any vain attempt to correlate this structure with the structure 

 or properties of the resulting and yet distant organism ; but merely 

 to see how far, by the study of its form and its changing internal 

 configuration, we may throw hght on certain forces which are for 

 the time being at work within it. 



We may say at once that we can scarcely hope to learn more of 

 these forces, in the first instance, than a few facts regarding their 



* Otto Warburg, Beitrage zur Physiologie der Zelle, insbesondere iiber die 

 Oxidationsgeschwindigkeit in Zellen; in Asher-Spiro's Ergebnisse der Physiologie, 

 XIV, pp. 253-337, 1914 (see p. 315). 



t See his Life by Bence Jones, ii, p. 299. 



X Both phrases occur, side by side, in Graham's classical paper on Liquid 

 diffusion applied to analysis, Phil. Trans, cli, p. 184, 1861; Chem. and Phys. 

 Researches (ed. Angus Smith), 1876, p. 554. 



