440 BIOLOGICAL PHYSICS 



may spring into immediate activity, according as the 

 conditions of growth and nutrition come into existence 

 and are sustained. In the vegetable kingdom and parts 

 of the animal kingdom these conditions are usually 

 seasonal, but in the higher animal kingdom, where 

 seasonal vital activity is modified by the exercise of 

 instinct and intelligence, seasonal activity gives place to, 

 more or less, perennial activity. The conditions of life, 

 or vital activity, include the supply and influence of 

 caloric as a motive power in starting the latent or dormant 

 principle of life of the spore, cell unit, or fragment of the 

 preceding living organism or body, into a repetition of the 

 parental life-work, along with the supply of organisable 

 pabulum, and " the free air of heaven," with its abundant 

 available oxygen, so absolutely necessary to all chemical 

 and chemico-physiological processes, be they organic or 

 inorganic. 



Underlying all these conditions, and instrumental in 

 carrying out the behests of the dormant incipient life within 

 the living unit, and, in fact, inseparable from it, is the other 

 condition^ the transmission of a latent, or potential, arrangement 

 of the constituent molecules and atoms of that unit, which, 

 or whereby, on the arrival of the required vital conditions 

 and the irresistible impulse of active, in succession to 

 passive, life, initiates or begins the living career of a new 

 being. 



This last but essential condition of transmitted latent 

 vital arrangement of molecule and atom, composing the 

 primordial germ, must operate through and by some 

 organic mode of force, so to speak, and some instrumentality, 

 in virtue of the possession of which it can lick into organic 

 form on the lines of the form from which, as an organic 

 unit or fragment, it has been detached the organisable 

 material within its reach. This mode of force we regard 

 as really equivalent to sympathetic nerve force or energy, a 

 force which is stored up and detached with, as latent or 

 potential, every primordial or spermo-germ cell and cario- 

 kinetic cell division, to be called into activity or formative 

 action, whenever the arrival of the required conditions 

 for its operation have been reached. This seemingly 

 indefinite, but absolutely essential, vital, molecular, and 



