54 . J. W. SLATER, ESQ., F.C.S., F.E.S., ON 



point in every case may be scientificilly represented as a specific 

 arrangement of molecules, in association with a tendency to select 

 from its environment, under favourable conditions, suitable 

 materials, to attacli them to itself, to fashion, in conformity' with 

 a type to which it owes its origin, the structure which thus arises, 

 to preserve it, in the process of waste and renewal, for as long a 

 time as possible from the disintegrating operation of hostile 

 tendencies, to adjust within certain Hraits its internal economy to 

 alterations in its environment, tlius maintaining, while it lasts, 

 a moving equilibrium. Accordingly, if physical life, whether 

 vegetable or animal, presupposes movements among molecules and 

 atoms, and is scientifically distinguishable from its absence by the 

 characteristics which are to be ascribed to such movements as are 

 specifically its own, we are at liberty to affirm, not indeed that we 

 have hit upon a phrase which accounts for life, but rather, that 

 within the range of physical investigation we have arrived at no 

 deeper discovery respecting it than that its phenomena imply 

 modes of motion peculiar to itself, and, in the stamp they have 

 received from the Intellect which designed them, sharply 

 distinguishable from all other modifications which take place 

 within the frame of nature in the way of molecular arrangement. 

 The proved impossibility of converting into life any inferior 

 manifestation of energy, and the now established truth that every 

 germ presupposes a parent life, are doubtless very instructive, if 

 thought be directed to some far distant past when physical life 

 could nowhere have been possible in any of the forms that are 

 known to us. But in seeking to discover when it began to be, 

 what do we aim at, if we ignore the question, whence comes the 

 energy which has produced the universe, and has been ceaselessly 

 at work throughout it from the beginning ? Do we desii^e to trace 

 cosmic energy to its source ? Then must we not assume the all- 

 pervading operation of an originating Intellect and Will. 



(5) From Mr. D. Biddle : — 



This interesting paper brings forcibly to one's mind Professor 

 Allman's presidential address to the British Association, in 1879, 

 on Protoplasm. He very truly said, " Avherever there is life, from 

 its lowest to its highest manifestations, there is })roto})hism ; 

 wherever there is protoplasm there too is life. The chemical 



