3 io 



VITAL POWER. 



cules are forced to arrange themselves in a particular manner. 

 For in the first place, no one has been able to explain by 

 known laws, the facts of development ; and secondly no one 

 is able to premise from the most careful and minute exami- 

 nation of living matter, that can be instituted, what form 

 will result from its development, or what kind of organism 

 has given origin to it; and 'lastly, the occurrence of succes- 

 sive series of structural changes which occur at definite 

 periods of development of a living being as its structures and 

 organs gradually progress towards completeness, and which 

 are as it were foreseen and prepared for at a very early period, 

 long before any structure whatever has been evolved, cannot 

 be accounted for unless some guiding power unknown to 

 physics, and not yet brought within the grasp of law, is 

 assumed to exist. 



It seems to me therefore, that no choice is left to us, 

 unless we determine unreasonably to persist in the affirma- 

 tion, that although physical and chemical phenomena are of 

 an order different altogether from the phenomena of living 

 matter, and exhibit no analogy with them, these latter never- 

 theless will certainly receive a physical explanation at some 

 future time. And this must be believed notwithstanding the 

 fact, that up to this time, the more that has been ascer- 

 tained concerning the two orders of phenomena, the vital 

 and the physical, the wider has the difference between them 

 appeared to be. Vital power prepares for far off events, 

 and acts as if phenomena, not to occur until after the lapse 

 of a considerable time, had been from the first foreseen. 

 Vital power suspends the action of chemical affinity, and 

 piles material particle above particle, the force of gravitation 

 notwithstanding. 



