404 SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT. 



question was definitely settled and the road quite 

 clear for research. To those and they comprised the 

 second class of thinkers referred to above who were 

 unwilling or unable to follow Lotze and Du Bois- 

 Reymond into the details of their criticism of the 

 illogical conception of force as employed in the term 

 " vital force," but who looked at the great facts of 

 economy, design, and recurrent order which are exhibited 

 in the living creation, these criticisms had little that 

 was convincing. If the term " vital force " was illogical, 

 some other term such as " vital principle " might be 

 substituted. The enormous difference between the 

 phenomena of living and of dead matter remained and 

 impressed itself on them. Liebig, and many naturalists 

 in France and Germany, had approached the study of 

 nature from the practical side. Their methods were not 

 mathematical but rather experimental, and very fre- 

 quently not limited to the laboratory and dissecting-room, 

 but carried out in the workshop of nature itself. In 

 spite of his successful attempts to establish clearer views 

 regarding the economic processes of living nature and 

 the application of chemical analysis, Liebig l to the end 



the mystery which attaches to 

 all beginnings as well as to the 

 great transitions in the ascending 



be studied by every one who desires 

 to be at home in the ancient and 

 modern literature of the subject. 



scale of natural phenomena being | The position of the author has 

 further emphasised and forcibly been many times criticised. See, 



driven home in the last-named 



inter alia, Kauf mann, ' Die Meta- 



address, which, as has been said, j physik in der modernen Biologic ' 



bears the title "The Seven Enig- | (Jena 1894), passim. 



mas." The three deliverances of Du I 1 Lord Kelvin in his essay " On the 



Bois-Reymond, together with the 

 copious notes and references which 

 he gives in the latest reprint, 

 serve as a very good and lucid 

 exposition of the inherent diffi- 

 culties of the problem, and should 



Dissipation of Energy " (reprinted 

 in ' Popular Lectures,' &c. , vol. iii. 

 p. 464) has the following interesting 

 note : " The influence of animal or 

 vegetable life on matter is infinitely 

 beyond the range of any scientific 



