RESPONSE IN THE LIVING AND NON-LIVING 107 



in May, I902. 1 This one was printed promptly, and without 

 any criticism or objection, although the writer made it the 

 occasion of re-stating the very matters previously objected 

 to. For though the paper is essentially physical, and in 

 the physicist's form of technical expression, his curves 

 of response of metals are more convincing than ever ; 

 and no summary of what was coming to be his main 

 thesis could be more unmistakable than what appeared 

 in the paper now accepted by the Royal Society. ' The 

 various phenomena connected with the response in inorganic 

 substances the negative variation the relation between 

 stimulus and response the increased response after con- 

 tinuous stimulation the abnormal response converted into 

 normal after long-continued stimulation the diphasic 

 variation the increase of response by stimulants, decrease 

 by depressors and abolition by " poisons " so-called all 

 these are curiously like the various response-phenomena in 

 living tissues. A complete account of the mutual relation 

 between the two classes of phenomena will be found in a 

 work to be shortly published, " On the Response in the 

 Living and Non-Li ving." 



Here, then, was at any rate a reversal of that decision 

 which had consigned his results to the Archives of the 

 Society. 



Herbert Spencer too, who was alive to scientific advances, 

 acknowledged ' Response in the Living and Non-Living ' in 

 cordial terms and with regrets that it was too late to avail 

 himself of the new results in his ' Principles of Biology/ 



Enough, however, for the present of scientific researches 

 and their controversies. For reader, as for writer, it may 

 be a welcome change to turn to another side of experience 

 and character, as developed in widely different environments 

 from those of laboratory science. 



1 ' On Electromotive Wave accompanying Mechanical Disturbance 

 in Metals/ Proc. Roy. Soc., 1902. 



