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56 PROF. LIONEL S. BEALE, F.R.C.P., F.R.S.. ON VITALITY. 
evolution, and those who talk of animals being evolved from 
more simple or lower creatures existing before them do not 
make their meaning clear, and they say that such vast time 
is required for the performance of the changes assumed that 
we are lost in a sort of vague cloud-land, where anything: or 
everything may be, but nothing capable of demonstration és. 
Like many wild notions of our time, not a few of our 
philosophical ideas are so vaguely and yet so cleverly stated 
that it 1s impossible to contradict them; but, as it seems to 
me, the word evolution, as generally used, refers to modi- 
fications affecting the whole creature as i¢ 7s. Whuile in truth 
the changes assumed are prepared for, and can only occur in 
the living matter at a very early period of development 
when the minute germ is structureless, and the semi-fluid 
matter of which it consists 13 so delicate that without the 
greatest care its arrangement and relations cannot be studied 
with success, it is to such minute particles of living matter 
that any process of evolution must be restricted. 
Next, with regard to the use of the words living and dead. 
Many seem to think that living things gradually die; 
gradually pass from the living to the dead state. This is 
not the fact. The passage from the living to the dead con- 
dition of a given living particle occurs suddenly, and the 
difference between the two states of the matter is absolute. 
There is no gradation, no slow transition from life to death, 
in the case of any form of living matter, and nothing that 
does not live can die. There is no transition that can be 
made out. <A particle of living matter is either living, or tt 
has ceased to live—either living or dead; and as far as I know 
all instances of dormant vitality that have been brought 
forward and called dormant because they are not active are 
really alive. There is no instance in which life can cease 
for a moment without death occurring. The difference, I 
repeat, is in all cases absolute. The particle of matter that 
dies never lives again, and this seems to me a point which 
ought to have been considered long ago, but it has been 
eyaded. ‘There is only one way in which non-living matter 
can pass into the living state, and that is by the agency of a 
living particle of some kind. There is no instance known of 
any non-living matter of any kind becoming living, except by 
the direct and immediate influence of living matter which existed 
before it upon the non-living matter that it takes up or that 
is brought to it. The living matter always takes up the 
non- living matter and communicates its vital power to this 
