PHYSICS AND CHEMISTRY OF DISEASE. 47 



physical hypothesis of life. Neither physicist 

 nor chemist can explain by physics and che- 

 mistry the increase in size, or the division and 

 sub-division of the tiniest monad, or the lowest 

 microscopic fungus. It is time that his inca- 

 pacity to do so were distinctly admitted and 

 definitely acknowledged, and that persons un- 

 learned in the details of life science should no 

 longer be encouraged in the belief that living 

 things are force-constructed mechanisms, and 

 that life has been evolved from ordinary matter 

 in which there was no life. 



Next, let me inquire if the facts so familiar 

 to us who are daily brought face to face with 

 the various remarkable changes occurring in 

 the tissues of man's body in disease are to be 

 explained by physics and chemistry. It would 

 surely be difficult to find remarks having any 

 pretension to scientific accuracy more pitiful 

 than many of those which have been advanced 

 as physical and chemical explanations of the 

 phenomena of disease. To fully explain 

 any disease whatever by mechanics must be 

 impossible, unless the phenomena of health are 

 also susceptible of mechanical explanation. 

 What can be more vague and inconclusive than 



