604 Transactions. — Miscellaneous. 



Aet. LXXII. — On a Common Vital Force. 

 By Coleman Phillips. 



[Read before the Wellington Philosophical Society, 20th September and 

 1st November, 1893.] 



Section I. — Similakity of Construction. 



I should like to refer to some of the facts I have been col- 

 lecting for years past to illustrate the perfect equality of con- 

 struction amongst all living things in the common vital force, 

 and I would ask members to treat this section as following my 

 last paper upon " Spiders as Engineers." 



The first idea of a suspension bridge was suggested, I 

 believe, by the creepers in the tropical Mexican forests, not 

 from spiders' bridges. Brunei designed his famous boring- 

 shield, with which the Thames Tunnel w^as excavated, solely 

 by watching through a microscope the movements of the 

 Teredo navalis (ship-worm), which used to be so destructive 

 to our ships. The Eddy stone Lighthouse is built on the plan 

 of a tree-trunk, and is fastened to the rock in a manner similar 

 to the way a tree clings to the soil. Our chief harbour engi- 

 neers, supplied with the force of a hundred thousand men, 

 cannot surpass the labour of the coral polypi in great protec- 

 tective works.''' The spiral stairways of some of our highest 

 towers do not surpass in strength and design the whorls of the 

 little sea-shell Turritclla. What works have we to exceed 

 in strength and lightness, combined with storage-capacity, the 

 cells of the common honeycomb ? How many things are 

 there which we construct more accurate in measurement than 

 the web of any ordinary geometric spider ? Very few : the 

 graded circle for an equatorial telescope perhaps is equal to 

 the web in accuracy. Sir Joseph Paxton designed the Crystal 

 Palace from the floral structure of the gigantic leaves of a 

 water-lily {Victoria rcgia) : thus, by solely patterning after 

 nature, an obscure gardener became a great architect. Do 

 any of our aerial machines compare for one moment with the 

 mode in which nature carries, say, a thistle-seed fifty or one 

 hundred miles through the air, although I must say that 

 aeronauts try to copy the structure and movements of birds ? 

 But there are many inanimate microscopic things always float- 

 ing in the atmosphere the form of which they had far better 

 study. (The word " inanimate" may be wrong, as anything 



* In Napier, Hawke's Bay, a breakwater is being constructed at a 

 cost of £500,000. I do not think it possible to construct a harbour of any 

 great utility there under a cost of £5,000,000. 



