192 Transactions of the Society. 



to controvert evidence founded upon observation, and arguments 

 based on facts which any one may demonstrate. Is it not most 

 wonderful that Professor Huxley can persuade himself that a single 

 reader of intelligence will fail to see the absurdity of the comparison 

 he institutes between the invisible, undemonstrable, undiscovered 

 " machinery " of his supposititious " molecular machine " and the 

 actual visible works of the actual clock, which any one can see and 

 handle, and stop and cause to go on again ? 



Magnify living matter as we may, nothing can be demonstrated 

 but an extremely delicate, transparent, apparently semi-fluid sub- 

 stance. But observations on some specimens under certain advan- 

 tages of illumination, and with the aid of the very highest 

 magnifying power that can be brought to bear, favour the 

 conclusion that living matter should be regarded as consisting of 

 infinite numbers of infinitely minute particles, varying much in 

 size, and possibly capable of coalescing, free to move amongst one 

 another, as they exist surrounded by a fluid medium which contains 

 the materials in solution for their nutrition, and other substances. 



One may transport oneself in imagination into infinite space, 

 amid the never-ceasing vibrations visible and invisible — " The lucid 

 interspace of world and world, where never creeps a cloud, or moves 

 a wind," and may perhaps all but see combined in one mental 

 image, as they ever course through space, suns and worlds and 

 systems. And although at first the mind is almost lost in the 

 contemplation of the infinite physical vastness presented it, it 

 is nevertheless able to seize in some degree a more than shadowy 

 conception of the exactness and regularity of the eternal move- 

 ments, and to recognize the never-ceasing operation in the material 

 universe of inflexible, unchanging law. 



But he who in imagination can succeed in mentally placing 

 himself amid the atoms in the interatomic spaces of a Hving 

 particle, will be in the very heart as it were of an infinity of a very 

 difi'erent order — infinite movement and change affecting infinitely 

 minute particles, so very near to one another that the matter 

 of one may as it were run into that of the other, and the masses 

 divide and subdivide again. Of all this movement and change of 

 particles how very little of what occurs in a portion of matter not 

 more than the one hundred- thousandth of an inch in diameter can 

 be comprised in one mental image ? But beyond all this there is 

 the power of prospective change, acting through years it may be, 

 which is somehow associated with the minute particles of living 

 matter, as well as many complex phenomena of which the mind 

 cannot take cognizance as a whole, but must consider, as it were, one 

 by one in several successive pictures. 



Could we peer into the very substance of the living particle 

 itself as it was increasing in size and communicating to non-living 



