2 i 2 Medicine : 



The rapid progress of chemical research, steadily 

 sapping the barrier between organic and inorganic 

 Nature, has now reached the very confines of life, 

 even forecasting an ultimate analysis of those 

 subtile physico-chemical processes whose mys- 

 terious unity of action in the organic molecule we 

 provisionally call vital force. Six years ago a 

 President of the Chemical Section of the British 

 Association affirmed that, no matter how successful 

 the reduction of vital to physico-chemical activi- 

 ties, a residuum would always evade such explana- 

 tion and require an intelligent directive agency ; 

 but the latest researches of stereochemistry into 

 enantiomorphous substances, seem to show that 

 the enantiomorphous agency working in the dead 

 universe may dispense with the need of the meta- 

 physical assumption. However that be, certain 

 it is that day after day, with every step forward in 

 physics and chemistry, proofs accumulate that all 

 \ital processes rest at bottom on physical and 

 chemical processes of the same kind — although 

 raised to a higher power — as those which take 

 place out of the living body. 



Deep as the chemist penetrates into the sub- 

 tilties of matter, there is a yet deeper order of 

 inquiry into the mysteries of the infinitely little 

 and its most potent forces. The discovery of 

 radial rays, perpetually thrown off in radio-active 

 dissociation with an energy greater than that 

 liberated in the most violent chemical decomposi- 

 tions, has taught us that the atom is not a simple 



