10 GERMINATION 



that supplies the heart with energy during every second of 

 our lives : what actuates plain muscle, how we see pictured 

 and hear sounds, or why we sleep. 



As it is in animal so it is in vegetable physiology. 

 Admirable work has, it is true, been done in Histology, 

 Morphology and in Anatomy. Those deal with things that can 

 be seen. The unseen remains for the most part — unseen. 



And, unfortunately, the average man takes far less interest 

 in his own body than in that of his favourite horse or dog. 

 It is easy enough to understand the working of a steam 

 or internal combustion engine, because we have been shown 

 that one is driven by volatilised water and the other by 

 volatilised petrol, or paraffin, or benzol, or gasoline, but 

 while we all know that the human body is an organism of 

 a much more wonderful nature than any engine invented 

 by man, it is not supposed to be actuated by any motive 

 power at all ; or at all events, no one seems to know what 

 the motive power is, although common sense tells us it 

 must exist. 



In the seed, in the plant, in the cell or cells from which 

 all living things spring, the electrical structure is so clearly 

 evident as to leave very little, if any, doubt as to the form 

 of energy which calls them into activity, and maintains 

 them and the chemical processes associated with them. 



Some explanation of the chaotic state in which we find 

 theories of Hfe and action offers itself in the fact that for 

 some obscure reason it is sought to establish a single cause 

 of vital phenomena. It is chemical or it is electrical ; one 

 or the other — when, clearly, it is both. The theorist who, 

 like myself, attributes the performance of body functions 

 to a force resembling electricity cannot but admit that the 

 chemical reactions which accompany those performances 

 are equally vital in their importance to life ; he merely 

 postulates that neuro-electrical action is precedent to 

 chemical change. The physiologist, however, in effect, 

 denies the existence of a nerve-force of an electrical nature 

 and insists upon chemistry as being responsible for all the 

 phenomena which the chemical theory itself fails throughout 

 to explain. 



