372 Mr. G. Newport on the Reciprocal Relation 



the connexion being traced through the nervous force on the one 

 hand, and light and electricity on the other. This conception, or 

 idea of relation, was expressed in the following words in my 

 paper on Meloe, after some experiments on the effects of light 

 on the instincts of the animal had been detailed : — 



" Thus the unerring influence of a great physical cause, which 

 arouses the instinct of the newly developed being, seems to be 

 clearly indicated in the effects of light upon these Meloes. These 

 effects I may perhaps be allowed to designate the polarization of 

 instinct. The facts I have now detailed lead me, in conformity 

 with the discovery by Faraday of the analogy of light with heat, 

 magnetism and electricity, to regard light as the primary source 

 of all vital and instinctive power, the degrees and variations of 

 which may, perhaps, be referred to modifications of this influence 

 on the special organization of each animal body. Matteucci 

 already has shown that electricity and nervous function are 

 closely related ; and now that Professor Faraday has proved that 

 light and electricity are the same principle, we seem to have ap- 

 proached closer to a knowledge of the origin of life. The throes 

 of parturition in the pregnant female, — the electrical shock of 

 the Torpedo, — and doubtless also the ejection of poison by sting- 

 ing insects, — the impressions of sensation, and the act of con- 

 traction in muscular fibre, — all seem to be concomitant with the 

 maturation, evolution, change of form or of nature of some ma- 

 terial constituent of organic Hfe, — and directly connected with, 

 or influenced by, the hitherto regarded imponderable agent, ner- 

 vous function ; a too intense, or too frequent diffluence (exhau- 

 stion) of which seems to hasten the dissolution of the whole body, 

 and diminish the intensity of those affinities by which its primary 

 constituents are held together, and the cessation of which con- 

 stitutes death .^^ 



This enunciation of view respecting the relations of the vital, 

 instinctive and physical forces, the Council of the Linnsean Society 

 did not permit me to retain in my paper printed in their ' Trans- 

 actions,^ so that only the first two sentences I have quoted 

 are there published, and I was compelled, but not without re- 

 luctance and remonstrance, to submit to the omission of the 

 remainder. But a portion of the omitted paragraph, sufficient 

 perhaps to establish the fact of the view having been announced, 

 had already been published in the Report of the Proceedings of 

 the Society, first in the Gardeners' Chronicle for November 22nd, 

 and, more explicitly, in the Athenaeum for December 6, 1845, in 

 the following words : — 



" In the course of the paper the author pointed out some re- 

 markable effects of light on the development and instincts of the 

 young larva, as shown by experiments which he detailed ; and 



