WoO: T j REGENERATIVE ENERGY. 47 
follow that there is any identity between vital activity and 
physico-chemical forces. The power which causes chemical 
elements to combine is not identical with the power which 
vesults from their combination ; nor is the power which breaks 
down a chemical compound identical with the powers of its 
separate elements. 
The views here enunciated are not contradicted by the long- 
established fact, that the laws which regulate the formation of 
chemical compounds are the same for both organic and inor- 
ganic bodies. The position taken does not affirm that organic 
compounds differ from inorganic either in material constituents, 
or in the forces which hold these constituents together. What 
we do affirm is this: We cannot stop with the most complex 
molecules revealed or revealable by chemical or physical re- 
search ; we must pass from organic to living, organized matter, 
not by the supervention of new laws, but by ultra-chemico- 
physical, or chemico-organic combinations, which are absolutely 
beyond the highest possibilities of chemical analysis. Inability 
to define these higher modes of combination is no reason for 
doubting the testimony of all our senses to their existence. 
And why should we expect chemical research to bring any 
positive confirmation of their reality, when all chemical analysis 
presupposes conditions which are the absolute negation of vital 
conditions? Does self-stultification ever become more complete 
than in the assumption that vital forces and conditions are dis- 
coverable precisely there where they confessedly do not exist ? 
Or is it rational to conclude that, because vital conditions have 
arisen from non-vital, the exclusive study of the latter will reveal 
the former? So long as the chemist’s methods debar him from 
the study of physiological modes of aggregation will he be im- 
potent to divine the links which connect molecular motion with 
sensibility, and just so long will “physiological chemistry” 
remain a delusive misnomer. 
A complex aggregate of atoms, so bound together by mutual 
affinities as to represent a physical unit, possessing, as a whole, 
properties and powers derived from but unlike those of its con- 
stituent elements, and existing by virtue of, and only during the 
maintenance of, the chemical connexus of these elements, is a 
conception which may be carried straight forward up to the 
cell. The living cell may be regarded as a system of very com- 
