128 Mr. W. F. Stanley on Vortex Motions. 



other active vital forces known or unknown), it becomes appa- 

 rent that growth may be the resultant of continuity of the same 

 system of forces, which may at first induce a vascular or supply 

 system in the smaller earlier parts of a vital system, vegetable 

 or animal. This consideration is important to us in other 

 ways, as it opens to us the mechanical principles of abnormal 

 growths ; as, for instance, the class of tumours of the sarco- 

 matous class, which are popularly termed wens, which often 

 attain large dimensions and contain a circulatory system 

 entirely abnormal to the animal upon which they grow. 



I have some hope also that these ideas may be influential in 

 further opening up the science of vital mechanics — a science 

 which under the name of biology has already made such rapid 

 advances by the labours of such men as Darwin, Huxley, 

 Spencer, and Dyer in our own country, and of Cohn, Haeckel, 

 Woolf, Kiihne, in Germany, and of others elsewhere.^ 



We may, with our present knowledge, define a vital being as 

 a unit cell or one made up of cellular aggregates or tissues in 

 which there is often mineral matter interposed. This know- 

 ledge apparently reduces the mechanics of life to a certain 

 amount of simplicity. But when we come to examine more 

 closely we find that cells although apparently alike are so 

 various that by assumed internal differences (of the causes of 

 which we have no conception) every fabric of animal and 

 vegetable life is raised to a special form or condition, in which 

 the cellular construction becomes much more differentiated 

 or even disappears. This is effected principally, or at least 

 in higher organisms, by means of an induced intercellular 

 vascular system of some kind, and it is the mechanics 

 of this vascular system {and not the vital principles which I do 

 not pretend to comprehend) of which I have offered sug- 

 gestions to you this evening. I have also some thoughts 

 that the cell itself, which acts as a kind of raw material of life, 

 and is so small in its germ form as to be invisible under any 

 microscope yet invented, although it contains in this primitive 

 form many millions of atoms, is itself a complex system ; in 

 which similar vascular systems to those of which I have spoken 

 may be active in influencing the production by development 

 of visible forms. «,-,/■- ,1 



10 i>iOV'^13S6 



