PROFESSOR VIRCHOW AND EVOLUTION. 405 



organic to the organic world will feel it doubly serious 

 to demand that this theory, so utterly discredited, 

 should be in any way accepted as the basis of all our 

 views of life.' I hold with Virchow that the failures 

 have been lamentable, that the doctrine is utterly dis- 

 credited. But my position here is so well known that 

 I need not dwell upon it further. 



With one special utterance of Professor Virchow his 

 translator connects me by name. ' I have no objection/ 

 observes the Professor, ' to your saying that atoms of 

 carbon also possess mind, or that in their connection 

 with the Plastidule company they acquire mind; only 

 / do not know how I am to perceive this.' This is sub- 

 stantially what I had said seventeen years previously 

 in the ' Saturday Review.' The Professor continues: 

 ' If I explain attraction and repulsion as exhibitions of 

 mind, as psychical phenomena, I simply throw the 

 Psyche out of the window, and the Psyche ceases to be 

 a Psyche.' I may say, in passing, that the Psyche that 

 could be cast out of the window is not worth house- 

 room. At this point the translator, who is evidently a 

 man of culture, strikes in with a foot-note. ' As an 

 illustration of Professor Virchow's meaning, we may 

 quote the conclusion at which Dr. Tyndall arrives re- 

 specting the hypothesis of a human soul, offered as 

 an explanation or a simplification of a series of obscure 

 phenomena psychical phenomena, as he calls them. 

 " If you are content to make your soul a poetic render- 

 ing of a phenomenon which refuses the yoke of ordinary 

 physical laws, I, for one. would not object to this 

 exercise of ideality." ' * Professor Virchow's meaning, 

 I admit, required illustration; but I do not clearly see 

 how the quotation from me subserves this purpose. I 

 * Presidential Address delivered before the Birmingham and 

 Midland Institute, October 1, 1877. 'Fortnightly Review,' Nov. 

 1, 1877, p. 607. 



