The President's Address. By L. 8. Beale, F.B.8. 217 



thing, or a part of any living thing, in nature ? I challenge any 

 one to give an adequate explanation of vital movements proceeding 

 in many different directions, and at the same moment, in a living 

 mass as clear as water, during a few seconds of time. If the hypo- 

 thesis of some hidden and unknown molecular machinery is admitted, 

 we get no nearer to the explanation of the fact, unless the arrange- 

 ment and mode of action of the supposed "machinery" can be 

 pointed out. That such assertions concerning what ma'j be, and 

 the speculations thereupon, may postjione for a little while the crash 

 of materialistic philosophy that impends, is possible ; but even this 

 is doubtful. People have but to look, and they will find structure 

 gradually appearing out of the structureless, and becoming more 

 distinct as development advances. The earlier phenomena being 

 universally characterized by absence of structure — structure being 

 seen to develop in the formless — why should it be assumed that 

 invisible structure existed from the first ? 



In the next place, let me ask you to notice the attempts made to 

 show the varying degrees of simplicity and complexity in what is 

 called undifferentiated protoplasm. Some, it is said, exhibit the 

 " extremest simplification." This is simple protoplasm ; other kinds 

 are supposed to have a more complex organization. But all this 

 is purely gratuitous speculation, and is not based upon any facts 

 whatever, for the lowest form of protoplasm is neither more nor 

 less simple in composition or molecular arrangement or constitution, 

 as far as can be ascertained by any investigation to which it can be 

 subjected, than that of man himself. All is structureless ; and, so 

 far, no one has succeeded in ascertaining, by any method of examina- 

 tion to which protoplasm can be submitted, whether a given mass 

 has emanated from a very low and simple organism or from a high 

 and complex one. Neither have we any means of judging whetlier 

 any given piece of protoplasm is capable of evolving a low or a high 

 form of life. There is no reason for the conclusion that the form 

 of life to be evolved is in any way determined by the physical con- 

 stitution of the living matter. The cause of the result, whatever 

 its nature may bo, is associated with, and operates upon, structure- 

 less matter only. Nor is there any evidence of any quantitative 

 relation between structure-forming j^ower and the matter by which 

 this is transmitted from particle to particle ; seeing that a particle of 

 living matter, which probably weighs considerably less than the one 

 hundred-millionth of a grain, by transmitting its peculiar power 

 from material particle to particle, is capa])lo, during a period extend- 

 ing over many years after its own formation, of imposing upon 

 many pounds of matter structural, and not only structural, pecu- 

 liarities of the most striking kind. Let the advocates of the 

 molecular machinery of living matter, and the believers in hidden 

 molecular mechanism and molecular constitution, consider the pecu- 



