2l6 LIFE AND DEATH. 



coincide with functional activity, but is its measure 

 and expression. 



The Tivo Kinds of Phenomena of Vitality. — Another 

 point on which Claude Bernard is right and his 

 opponent is wrong is not less fundamental. What 

 are we to understand by functional phenomena ? 

 This is the very point at issue. Now, in the mind of 

 physiologists, this expression has a perfectly definite 

 meaning. It is not so with Le Dantec. Physiologists 

 who have studied animals rather high in organization 

 — in which the differentiation of phenomena enables 

 us to grasp the fundamental distinction — have readily 

 recognized that the phenomena of living beings are 

 divided into two categories. There are some which 

 are intermittent, alternative, which take place, or grow 

 stronger at certain moments, but which cannot be 

 continuous — they are the functional acts ; there are 

 others in which this characteristic of explosives, 

 energetic expenditure and intermittence, do not 

 appear — they are, in general, the nutritive acts. The 

 muscle which contracts shows functional activity. It 

 has an activity and a repose. During this apparent 

 repose we must not say that it is dead ; it has a life, 

 but that life is obscure as far as the salient fact of 

 functional movement is concerned. The salivary 

 gland which throws up waves of saliva when the food 

 is introduced and masticated in the mouth, or when 

 the chord of the tympanum is at work, is in a state of 

 functional activity ; this is the salient phenomenon. 

 But before, though nothing, absolutely nothing, was 

 flowing through the glandular canal, yet the gland 

 was not reduced to the condition of a dead organ : it 

 was living a more obscure, a less evident life. The 

 microscopical researches of Kiihne, Lea, and Langley, 



