THE BEGINNINGS OF LIFE. 17 



1845 ty Mayer of Heilbronn, in a memoir on c Organic 

 Movement in its Relation to Material Changes/ in 

 which he showed that the processes taking place in 

 living organisms, animal or vegetable, were produced 

 by forces acting upon them from without, and that 

 the changes in their composition brought about by 

 these external agencies were the immediate sources 

 of those modes of force apparently generated in the 

 organisms themselves. In the same year also Mr. 

 Newport was led by a consideration of the relations 

 which had been shown to exist between light and 

 electricity by Faraday, and between electricity and 

 nervous power by Matte ucci *, as well as ' by the 

 known dependence of most of the functions of the 

 body on the latter, to consider light as the primary 

 source of all vital and constructive power, the de- 

 grees and variations of which may, perhaps, be re- 

 ferred to modifications of this influence on the special 

 organization of each animal body 2 .' In the following 



which we subjoin, that his notions otherwise were verging in the right 

 direction. ' All the chemical changes,' he says, ' that mark the course 

 of nature, are attended with changes of temperature, from the slowest 

 process of fermentation to the most rapid combustion ; that is, all the 

 decompositions and recombinations of matter are attended with the 

 addition or subtraction of caloric. Without the continual agency of the 

 solar beams, the vital air, the ocean, and the solid ground would become 

 a motionless mass of inert and chaotic matter. Without the reception 

 of caloric from the atmosphere by respiration, the wonderful mechanism 

 of animal motion, sensation, and life, could not go on.' 



1 Physical Phenomena of living beings. 



2 This passage is to be found only in the ' Athenaeum ' for Dec. 6, 



C 



