j 
‘xi PHENOMENA OF ORGANIC NATURE — 305 
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in question has satisfied those conditions, how far 
he has not satisfied them, how far they are satis- 
fiable by man, and how far they are not satisfiable 
by man. » 
 To-night, in taking up the first part of the 
question, I shall endeavour to put before you a 
sort of broad notion of our knowledge of the con- 
dition of the living world. There are many ways 
of doing this. I might deal with it pictorially and 
graphically. Following the example of Humboldt 
in his “ Aspects of Nature,” I might endeavour to 
point out the infinite variety of organic life in 
every mode of its existence, with reference to the 
variations of climate and the like; and such an 
attempt would be fraught with interest to us all; 
but considering the subject before us, such a course 
would not be that best calculated to assist us. In 
an argument of this kind we must go further and 
dig deeper into the matter ; we must endeavour to 
look into the foundations of living Nature, if I 
may so say, and discover the principles involved in 
some of her most secret operations. I propose, 
therefore, in the first place, to take some ordinary 
animal with which you are all familiar, and, by 
easily comprehensible and obvious examples drawn 
from it, to show what are the kind of problems 
which living beings in general lay before us; and 
T shall then show you that the same problems are 
laid open to us by all kinds of living beings. 
But, first, let me say in what sense I have used the 
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