730 Reviews. [Oct., 
research, have been led to deny altogether the existence of any specific 
vital force. But whilst readily conceding that the advocates for a 
special vital force have claimed too great a dominion for their favourite 
potentate, and that many of its supposed subjects are really under the 
governance of other powers, yet we are by no means inclined entirely 
to dethrone it. We agree with our author in believing that there is 
a series of phenomena manifested in organized bodies which cannot be 
explained by chemico-physical laws, and which is not capable of being 
recognized even by chemico-physical methods of research. 
The broad line of demarcation which separates things animate from 
things inanimate: the manifestation in the former of those processes 
which the physiologist distinguishes by the terms development, growth, 
and maintenance—processes which are exhibited by the simplest vege- 
table or animal cell as clearly as by the highest and most complicated 
organism, and which consist not in mere superficial accretions of new 
matter as in the formation of crystals, the highest of all inorganic 
forms and processes, but in minute interval molecular changes—points 
at once to the existence in the former of a specific determining power, 
no indication of which is met with in the latter. 
‘“* And if life were made up of forces similar to those which act in vari- 
ous ways both on organic and on inorganic matter, we might expect to find 
the transition from things inanimate to things animate the same in 
character with all other transactions in nature; the border-land would be 
occupied with semi-animate materials, and semi-mineral vegetables or 
animals, with instances of equivocal life and products of doubtful organiza- 
tion. Whereas from the highest to the very lowest organism, the pheno- 
mena of life are distinct and unquestionable.” 
There is a class of scientific observers—pseudo-scientific, we had 
almost written—who believe that, by passing electrical currents through 
solutions of albumen or other nitrogenized substances, they can produce 
in them nuclei, cells, or other well-defined organic forms ; and that thus, 
by the operation of a well-known physical force on certain forms of 
matter, structures, for whose production the vitalist contends that a 
special force is necessary, may be generated. But it has never yet 
been shown that these oval or spherical cell-like forms produced in 
such solutions are capable of going through those processes of develop- 
ment, growth, and maintenance which are the characteristic phenomena 
of all living beings. ‘Their morphological similarity has too hastily 
been assumed to be a proof of their teleological identity. As well 
might it be said that the arborescent appearance seen on the glass in 
our window-frames on a frosty winter’s morning was the same thing 
as the trees and other plants whose form and method of branching it 
simulates. 
We have not space to follow Mr. Higgins through the remainder 
of his carefully reasoned argument that the vital principle is a thing 
sui generis, but in order to give our readers some idea of its nature we 
reproduce in this place his general summary :— 
“1st. The unparalleled hiatus which exists between things animate and 
things inanimate. 
