THEORY OF ONE ONLY LIVING MATTER. 5 



not fall back upon the notion of some essence or prin- 

 ciple which escaped at death, leaving the chemical 

 compound the same, he speaks with extreme vague- 

 ness of a peculiar variety of force called vital, evolved 

 from the chemical force of the food by subtle chemical 

 processes which we cannot as yet imitate in the la- 

 boratory. It is easy to show that no possible form of 

 iorce, as defined in physics, could compel chemical com- 

 pounds, such as albumen, fibrin, and others presumedly 

 making up the living matter, to act differently from 

 the manner in which they must act according to their 

 molecular composition, as albumen, protein, and the 

 rest. 



The difficulty was felt and acknowledged by 

 Fletcher, and instead of evading it, he met it at once, 

 and declared that the truly living matter was not in 

 simply a somewhat different chemical state from that 

 in which it exists after death such a statement would 

 be a mere bald truism but that the elements are in a 

 state of combination not to be called chemical at all in 

 the ordinary sense, but one which is utterly sui generis. 

 That, in fact, no albumen, fibrin, myosin, protagon, or fats 

 exist at all in_the_living_ matter, but that the sum of 

 the elements of all these is united into a compound, 

 for which we have no chemical name, and of the com- 

 plex mode in which the atoms are combined we can 

 form no idea ; and it is only at the moment of death 

 that those chemical compounds, with which we are 

 familiar, take their origin. In fact, that death means 

 simply the resolution of this complex combination 

 into the simpler compounds, albumen, fibrin, and the 

 rest, which we find on analysis. Among the expres- 



