44 - JOURNAL OF THE [April, 



plasm when the embryo begins to grow. Doctor Sterling, as 

 well as Doctor Beale, insisted that vitality was an inherent and 

 inseparable attribute of real protoplasm, and that consequently 

 there could not be such a thing as dead protoplasm. I doubt 

 whether, under their definitions, there can be even a dormant 

 protoplasm ; for, in truth, what is dormant life, which this im- 

 plies ? Is it not in effect dead life ? That is to say, is it not 

 the essential sign of life that it is not dormant ? Beale urges 

 that there is no intermediate step between dead matter and liv- 

 ing matter. Matter, he argues, is either wholly alive or wholly 

 dead. Latent life, then, is at bottom only one of the philosophi- 

 cal figments of which we have already heard. Suspended ani- 

 mation may be possible in a complicated organism, but if we are 

 to follow the philosophers down to a basal life-stuff, we cannot 

 logically admit any factor into the problem but matter and life. 

 In other words, the only admissible alternative is matter plus 

 vitality or matter minus vitality. 



This, then, brings us to the point to which my address of a 

 year ago brought us,— to the impassable gulf between the not- 

 living and the living. This is the perennial mystery of mysteries 

 to whose brink every thorough scientist and every deep philos- 

 pher sooner or later comes, but beyond whose thick darkness no 

 human eye can see, and under whose appalling silence even the 

 wisest man must stand dumb. 



