114 PROFESSOR LIONEL BEALE, E.E.C.P., F.R.S., ON THE 



the changes which occur in every vital act and in vital growth. 

 Others prefer to consider the infinite power of life as immanent 

 in all matter whether living or non-living. In the second 

 century of the Christain Era, was it not argued that "either 

 Providence or Atoms rule the Universe," but may we not now 

 feel sure that atoms never did rule, and never will rule, 

 anything in this world, and that ruling power in living nature 

 has ever belonged, and will continue to belong, to Providence 

 alone ? 



The wonderful advance in every department of natural 

 knowledge and the unceasing improvements in the methods of 

 investigation, including the preparation of all kinds of specimens 

 for examination with high magnifying povv^ers, during the 

 Victorian age, have been un precedented ; and our new knowledge 

 of the nature, genesis, movements, composition and physical 

 state, not only of the matter of our world, but of the distant 

 stellar systems, suns and their satellites, and the far off nebula?, 

 visible and invisible — has reached far beyond anything dis- 

 covered in all previous time. The more exact knowledge of the 

 operation of the unchangeable physical laws, by which the 

 lifeless parts of the eternal universe have been, and must 

 continue to be governed, are but a few of the great and remark- 

 able additions to the knowledge of scientific men now living. 

 No wonder then, that these, and the results of other very recent 

 investigations in several departments of Physics, should have 

 led many thoughtful persons to conclude that all nature, living 

 and non-living, belongs to one physical category, and that all 

 vjorlds and all things iii, or of them, are ruled hy Physical law ! 

 But the doctrine that all nature living and non-living belonged 

 to one and the same physical category — that associated with 

 the material Atom from the beginning, were promises and 

 potencies of life — and that the poiuer some of us called life, was 

 evidence of the universal operation of unchanging physical law, 

 and therefore subordinate to eternal matter and its forces and 

 properties cannot be true. The enthusiasm of arbitrary law 

 loving physicists has led them to see everywhere in nature the 

 effects of universal energy only, and nothing indicative of vital 

 power either in their own consciousness, or in the creation and 

 maintenance of the life of the world. Geological research has 

 however happily rescued us from the impending doom suggested 

 by these supposed new physical revelations and such assurances 

 as this : — Man is but a mechanism made and controlled, like 

 the machines of which man is the maker, by physical law ; and 

 will and thought, and intellectual action, are but kinds or forms 



