BOTANICAL ADDRESS TO THE BRITISH ASSOCIATION. 15 



took place under the influence of protoplasm were probably 

 of a different kind from those with which the chemist is 

 ordinarily occupied. The plant produces a profusion of 

 substances, apparently with great facility, which the chemist 

 can only build up in the most circuitous way. As Victor 

 Meyer^^ has remarked : ' In order to isolate an organic sub- 

 stance, we are generally confined to the purely accidental 

 properties of crystallization and volatilization.' In other 

 words, the chemist only deals with bodies of great molecular 

 stability; while it cannot be doubted that those which play 

 a part in the processes of life are the very opposite in every 

 respect. I am convinced that if the chemist is to help in 

 the field of protoplasmic activity, he will have to transcend 

 his present limitations, and be prepared to admit that as 

 there may be more than one algebra, there may be more than 

 one chemistry. I am glad to see that a somewhat similar 

 idea has been suggested by other fields of inquiry. Pro- 

 fessor Meldola**' thinks that the investigation of photo- 

 chemical processes ' may lead to the recognition of a new 

 order of chemical attraction, or of the old chemical attraction 

 in a different degree.' I am delighted to see that the ideas 

 which were floating, I confess, in a very nebulous form in 

 my brain, are being clothed with greater precision by Loew, 

 In the paper which I have already quoted, he says of pro- 

 teids:*^ 'They are exceedingly lahil compomuls that can be 

 easily converted into relatively stable ones. A great 

 lability is the indispensable and necessary foundation for 

 the production of the various actions of the living proto- 

 plasm, for the mode of motions that move the life-machinery. 

 There is a source of motion in the labil position of atoms in 

 molecules, a source that has hitherto not been taken into 

 consideration either by chemists or by physicists. 



^Wharm. Jvurn., 1890, 773. iONature, xlii. 250. iiLoc. cii., 13. 



