MAN IS A SOUL CLAD IN AIR 77 



processes at work in the eggs of simple tmicellar 

 animals. They have been the means of determi- 

 ning the answer to the one great question, "What 

 is life?" and he regards all his previous discoveries 

 subsidiary to this one. He received his first hint of 

 this new theory of life through the fact that elec- 

 tricity is able to affect protoplasm in a more uni- 

 versal and effective way than any other form of 

 stimulus. And he drew the inference that if elec- 

 tricity is able to affect protoplasm in the form of 

 currents, it ought to do so in the form of ions, 

 which is an electrically charged atom or group of 

 atoms. 



In experimenting to determine the toxic and anti- 

 toxic of ions on protoplasm, which is the basic 

 substance of all physical life, he discovered that 

 any one salt will act as a poison on the eggs of a 

 sea urchin, but by adding one or more, or certain 

 other salts, he found it was able to counteract the 

 effects of this toxic effect. From which he concluded 

 that the toxic and antitoxic effect of the salts were 

 due to the manner in which its atoms are electric- 

 ally charged. 



He found that when a salt whose atoms are 

 positively charged come in contact with the eggs 

 of the sea urchin, they interfered with the life proc- 

 esses, while salts whose atoms were negatively 

 charged stimulate contraction; and the presence 

 of both positively and negatively charged atoms 

 were necessary, and the phenomena of life is due 

 to the play between the different charges of elec- 

 tricity in the molecules. The energy of foodstuffs 

 and motions of the heart and other muscles of the 

 body are not due to the production of heat, but 



