134 Luck, or Cunning ? 
appreciable even aroma of livingness so long as it is in 
actual use. In ‘“ Erewhon”’ I did not think it necessary 
to insist on this, and did not, indeed, yet fully know what 
I was driving at. 
The same disposition to avoid committing themselves to 
the assertion that any part of the body is non-living may 
be observed in the writings of the other authorities upon 
protoplasm above referred to; I have searched all they 
said, and cannot find a single passage in which they declare 
even the osseous parts of a bone to be non-living, though 
this conclusion was the raison d’étve of all they were saying 
and followed as an obvious inference. The reader will 
probably agree with me in thinking that such reticence can 
only have been due to a feeling that the ground was one on 
which it behoved them to walk circumspectly ; they prob- 
ably felt, after a vague, ill-defined fashion, that the more 
they reduced the body to mechanism the more they laid 
it open to an opponent to raise mechanism to the body ; 
but, however this may be, they dropped protoplasm, as I 
have said, in some haste with the autumn of 1879. 
