545th OEDIXAEY GEXEEAL MEETING, 



HELD (BY KIXD PEEMISSIOX) IX THE HALL OF THE 

 EOYAL SOCIETY OF AETS OX TUESDAY, MAY 6th, 



AT 4.40 P.ISI. 



The Eeesident, The Et. Hox. The Eael of Halsbury, 



TOOK THE ChaIE. 



The Minutes of the preceding Meeting were read and signed, and the 

 Secretary announced the election of Professor Theodore Flournoy, of 

 Geneva, as a Life Associate. 



THE ORIGIN OF LIFE— WHAT DO WE KNOW OF IT! 



By Peofessoe G. Sims Woodhead, M.A.. M.D, LL.D., 

 Fellow of Trinity Hall. 



FEOM the time of the first records of the human race, one 

 subject more than any other appears to have aroused the 

 thought and piqued the curiosity of man — the origin of life. 

 Speculations thereon have ever occupied a prominent 

 place and aroused the keenest interest in the human mind, 

 which has busied itself with theories, crude or profound, 

 according to the age, as to the beginnings of the powers which 

 are associated with living matter, and which collectively are 

 spoken of as life. 



Professor Schaifer, in his interesting and stimulating address 

 delivered before the British Association in September of last 

 year, before giving his definition of life, said.. " Everybody 

 knows, or thinks he knows, what life is ; at least we are all 

 acquainted with its ordinary manifestations " ; but he went on 

 to point out that the most profound and acute thinkers, after 

 devoting themselves to the framing of a definition of life, have 

 been constrained to admit, in the words of Herbert Spencer, 

 that no definition has yet been found " which would embrace all 

 the known manifestations of animate, and at the same time 

 exclude those of inanimate, bodies." 



It is not my intention to traverse much of the ground 

 covered by Professor Schafer, as to the non-identity of life 

 with soul, the phenomena indicative of life — movement, assimi- 

 lation, dis-assimilation — the chemical phenomena accompanying 

 life, the possibility of its synthetic production, and the chemical 

 constitution of living matter ; though these, amongst other 



