240 Ou1o STATE ACADEMY OF SCIENCE 
Since Woehler, the distinction between organic and inorganic 
matter has become merely schematic; but the line drawn at life 
has resisted obliteration 
It is true that my friend, Professor Herrera has said: 
“T conceive the human organism as a machine containing 
some five or six litres of blood employed in appropriating to 
itself the nutritious principles of food, absorbing oxygen, and 
carrying it to the nerve to make it vibrate by discharges of 
carbon-dioxide. 
“Life is now to be defined as the result of the physico- 
chemical action of protoplasmic currents, the cause of such 
currents being diffusion, heat, and some other secondary 
factors.” 
But until someone sees such currents set up in some way 
differing from the natural transmission of pre-existent life, a 
thing which no one at present even hopes for, the old boundary 
remains undisturbed. 
If any benefit is obtainable from a physico-chemical nomen- 
clature and notation, science will not object to their use. 
Suppose, then, we put it in the boldest form, that biology 
is now engaged in the creation of an available representation of 
the activities and laws of activity of these wonderful protoplasmic 
currents. 
The definition then would be something like this: Biology 
is the science created to give understanding and mastery of the 
protoplasmic activities on this earth; to make easy the explana- 
tion and description of such activities and the transmission of 
this mastery. 
The association, the suggestion is immediate: 
Beyond the microtome, the microscope, the statistics of 
observation, of experiment, of what instrument of world-con- 
quest must the new science avail herself? The answer is patent; 
of mathematics, that giant pincers of scientific logic which 
showed Newton the moon as simply a bigger apple trying to fall 
straight down on his head, flashed out in the mind of Adams the 
unseen planet Neptune, told Rayleigh that the chemists had 
always been breathing vast quantities of argon without knowing 
it, pointed to Mendeljeeff the places of unknown chemical ele- 
ments, and through Helmholtz and his pupil Hertz has given us 
the Lenard rays, the Roentgen rays, radium itself, and wireless 
telegraphy based on Hertzian waves. 
In mathematics, the part which is being recognized as pure 
deductive logic is ever greater. The residuum takes from 
biological advance itself new form and new statement. 
