268 VITAL POWER. 



substances previously present in the pabulum, but new 

 bodies altogether, and these often vary according to the 

 circumstances under which the matter dies. 



If I determined to yield all that could be yielded to 

 those who maintain that there is no vital power distinct 

 from ordinary force, I might say that a particle of soft 

 transparent matter, called by some, living, which came from 

 a pre-existing particle, effected, silently and in a moment, 

 without apparatus, without loss of material, at a tempe- 

 rature of 60 or lower, changes in matter, some of which 

 could be imitated in the laboratory in the course of days or 

 weeks by the aid of a highly skilled chemist, furnished with 

 complex apparatus and the means of producing a very high 

 temperature and intense chemical action, and with an 

 enormous waste of material. It is, however, obvious that 

 every independent, thoughtful person, must, at least for the 

 present, admit that the operations by which changes are 

 effected in substances by living matter, are in their nature 

 essentially different from those which man is obliged to 

 employ to bring about similar changes out of the body ; 

 and until we are taught what the agent or operator in the 

 living matter really is, surely there is nothing that should 

 excite the scorn of philosophers if we call it provisionally 

 vital power. Its effects cannot be denied and its operation 

 ought not to be ignored. 



At all events it cannot be philosophical, on the part of 

 any one to reassert in these days that nutrition is merely 

 a chemical process, unless he can imitate by chemical 

 means the essential phenomena which take place when any 

 living thing is nourished. The passage of a fluid through a 

 tissue by which s structure is preserved is not nutrition^ 



