Minute Organisms. 103 



doubt. Some perish considerably below the temperature of boiling 

 "Water, others are not injured at that heat. Some are not destroyed 

 by rapidly passing through red-hot tubes, and possibly others may 

 support for some time without injury temperatures of elevation 

 corresponding to those of depression in the experiments with 

 yeast and vaccine to which allusion has been made. Those who 

 beheve that our earth has passed through nebulous and molten 

 stages, and also consider, with Professor Tyndall, that no new force 

 or substance has been added, but that " life was present potentially 

 in matter when in the nebulous form," might not deem any terrestrial 

 heat capable of absolutely destroying this " potentiahty," in what- 

 ever form it might ultimately reside. The microscopical student 

 can only expect his special modes of investigation to throw an in- 

 direct hght upon problems of this description, the solution of 

 which may be altogether beyond the bounds of physical and 

 chemical research ; but it may be well to consider whether we may 

 not encourage fallacies by too vague and general an employment of 

 such terms as " life," " \dtal," " vitality," &c., and this is the more 

 necessary when we watch or take part in the still unsettled con- 

 troversy of the heterogenists. Some of the phenomena exhibited 

 by what we call hving organisms are obviously physical, others 

 purely chemical, and we arrive at last at intelligence, thought, and 

 manifestations of wiU, between which and any exhibition of physical, 

 chemical or electrical force, we cannot trace the slightest connection 

 of congruity or resemblance ; nor does science oflfer, or even promise 

 to offer, any explanation of the way in which they are connected 

 with the action of nerve or brain. To refer all to that imaginary 

 entity " vital force," would be an obvious blunder in logical method; 

 and if we exclude mental operations, as being beyond the domain of 

 mere " vital force," it will seem that we do not know anything 

 that would justify ascribing the simplest life processes of such 

 molecular organisms as M. Bechamp describes under the name of 

 microzymes, and the complex relations and correlations of phenomena 

 in the higher animals, to variations in the quantity of one vital 

 principle. Dr. Lionel Beale, the most ardent supporter of the 

 vital force doctrine still extant, says that " all truly vital phenomena 

 must necessarily be altogether out of the range of mere physical 

 investigation," Were this dictum worked into a definition of vital 

 phenomena, it would exclude all that living beings do, or suffer, in 

 accordance with physical or chemical laws ; and new discoveries in 

 synthetical chemistry would leave for vital force scarcely anything, 

 perhaps nothing, but a method of directing and co-ordinating 

 chemical and physical forces to vital ends. Science can make no 

 use of, but must be injured by, terms that lack precision ; and the 

 objection to referring a particular action to '' vital force " is, firstly, 

 that no one can tell us exactly what is meant by the term, and 



VOL. V. I 



