112 LAY SERMONS, ESSAYS, AND REVIEWS. [VIL 



is it an animal ? Is it both ; or is it neither ? Some decide in 

 favour of the last supposition, and establish an intermediate 

 kingdom, a sort of biological No Man s Land for all these 

 questionable forms. But, as it is admittedly impossible to draw 

 any distinct boundary line between this no man s land and the 

 vegetable world on the one hand, or the animal, on the other, it 

 appears to me that this proceeding merely doubles the difficulty 

 which, before, was single. 



Protoplasm, simple or nucleated, is the formal basis of all life. 

 It is the clay of the potter : which, bake it and paint it as he 

 will, remains clay, separated by artifice, and not by nature, from 

 the commonest brick or sun-dried clod. 



Thus it becomes clear that all living powers are cognate, and 

 that all living forms are fundamentally of one character. The 

 researches of the chemist have revealed a no less striking uni 

 formity of material composition in living matter. 



In perfect strictness, it is true that chemical investigation can 

 tell us little or nothing, directly, of the composition of living 

 matter, inasmuch as such matter must needs die in the act of 

 analysis, and upon this very obvious ground, objections, which 

 I confess seem to me to be somewhat frivolous, have been raised 

 to the drawing of any conclusions whatever respecting the com 

 position of actually living matter, from that of the dead matter 

 of life, which alone is accessible to us. But objectors of this 

 class do not seem to reflect that it is also, in strictness, true that 

 we know nothing about the composition of any body whatever, 

 as it is. The statement that a crystal of calc-spar consists of 

 carbonate of lime, is quite true, if we only mean that, by 

 appropriate processes, it may be resolved into carbonic acid and 

 quicklime. If you pass the same carbonic acid over the very 

 quicklime thus obtained, you will obtain carbonate of lime 

 again ; but it will not be calc-spar, nor anything like it. Can 

 it, therefore, be said that chemical analysis teaches nothing 

 about the chemical composition of calc-spar ? Such a statement 

 would be absurd ; but it is hardly more so than the talk one 

 occasionally hears about the uselessness of applying the results 



