SESSION 1907-8. 

Address given by the President, 
Dr. G. MORGAN,L.R.C.P. (Lond.), F.R.C.S. (E.) 
At the Conversazione held at the Royal Pavilion, October 4th, 1907. 
Function and Fatigue. 
N his Italian sketches, Heine opens one of his chapters by an 
imaginary conversation with an old lizard. “ Nothing in this 
world goes backward,” said the old lizard to Heine. “ Every- 
thing struggles forward, and in the end a great progress will have 
taken place in Nature. Stones will have become plants ; plants, 
animals; animals, men; and men will have become gods.” 
Heine’s old lizard uttered but half a truth when it spoke thus 
to him. 
There is in the Universe a constant procession from the 
unicellular to the multicellular taking place, z.e., from the simple 
to the complex. The root hairs of the vegetable touch and raise 
-the mineral into life, and so build up a store of energy for the 
animal to consume ; but plants and animals alike are but vivified 
rocks, governed and impelled forward by life itself,—the most 
mysterious of all forces. Check or destroy that mystic power, 
and tree or man, flora or fauna alike, fall back to their primitive 
inorganic atoms. And so the influx of life makes progress 
possible, and the withdrawal of that same force makes retro- 
gression compulsory. 
What is life? The pithy epigram says: “Life is bottled 
sunshine, and death the silent-footed butler who draws the cork.” 
That definition is as good and as bad as any other, but it has at 
any rate the virtue of ATTEMPTING to state what life is, whereas 
~ . most of the definitions, from Spencer’s ‘‘ Life is correspondence 
with environment,” only tell us what life does, not what it is. The 
fact is, Science knows nothing of the origin and essence of life, 
and perhaps never will know anything; but of the laws which 
govern life she knows much, and in the future will know far 
more. 
