1894- NOTES AND COMMENTS. 165 



Lord Salisbury's North Poles of Science. 



Two of these undiscovered countries of science (the nature and 

 origin of the elements and the nature of ether) are outside the special 

 scope of Natural Science. But in passing we may observe that, 

 while modern science is as unable to transmute the metals as were 

 the early alchemists, it is the merest dogmatism to say that the 

 boundary of our knowledge in this direction remains where it was 

 many centuries ago. The cataloguing and recording of the elements, 

 the negative results themselves of Stas, the researches of Crookes 

 upon the evolution of the elements, and the grouping of them by 

 MendeleefF, are all great strides in knowledge. We may be near or 

 far from knowledge of the nature and origin of the elements : it is 

 certainly true that we are nearer the goal by those years of brilliant 

 result and patient research upon which Lord Salisbury justly laid so 

 much stress. 



With regard to the nature and origin of life, we should reply to 

 Lord Salisbury in similar fashion. It is quite true that we do not 

 know the exact nature or the origin of life. But we do not regard it 

 as a problem so remote as to rank among the almost impossible quests 

 of science. If to-morrow Professor Biitschli or some other investigator 

 were to demonstrate that the phenomena of life could be called into 

 existence in the laboratory, we should feel that an advance much 

 more momentous in the minds of the populace than in the minds of 

 biologists had been made. For the result of recent research has been 

 to break down the barrier between the mystery of living matter and 

 force and the mystery of inorganic matter and force. Biologists will 

 not accept Lord Salisbury's definition of life as " the action of an un- 

 known force on ordinary matter," as " a mysterious impulse which is 

 able to strike across the ordinary laws of matter, and twist them for 

 a moment from their path." Whatever be the nature of life, it is not 

 a force twisting and thwarting the ordinary laws of matter. Nor is 

 life in any ordinary sense of the term a force at all. If we speak of 

 the chemical or physical work done by living organisms as the results 

 of the force of life, either we use the term as the vaguest metaphor, 

 or we imply that the force of life is only a phase of ordinary physical 

 and chemical forces. For the work done by an organism can be 

 measured in terms of the chemical and physical energies it employs, 

 and the actual growth of an organism, the multiplication of cells, 

 depends upon ponderable transformation of ordinary physical and 

 chemical forces. The results of much recent work on the nature 

 and functions of protoplasm lead many to think that the supposed 

 barrier, between living matter and matter that is not alive, has already 

 been broken down, and that living material is only a peculiarly com- 

 plicated mixture of known chemical and physical forces. Be that as 

 it may, there is more of the orator than of the thinker in Lord 

 Salisbury's handling of the problem of life. Life, like electricity, or 



