DNSEEN LIFE OF OUR WORLD AND OF LIVING GROWTH. 129 



When the discreditable opposition to religions thonght by 

 which the nineteenth centnry was distingnished from all 

 previous centnries, shall have subsided, and the occasional 

 undeserved personal attacks on some science-teachers 

 belonging to eductional institutions whicli like King's College, 

 London, had been founded and conducted upon religious 

 principles, shall have finally ceased, as l)efore long they will cease, 

 the soundness of our principles will be generally admitted, and 

 the long hoped for reunion of religion nnd science will become, 

 at least in England, an established fact. There will then be 

 some prospect of educational peace being restored, and the 

 unceasing progress of science-knowledge and learning resumed, 

 and steadily develop among all classes without further interrup- 

 tion, and the unmerited condemnation of those who perceive in 

 matter that lives, something, not in any way connected with any 

 kind of non-living matter, force, material properties, or blind, 

 passive, irresistible physical laws, will be forgotten. 



Anyone who has seen and studied small particles of living 

 matter growing dividing and subdividing in the fluid in which 

 it lives, will certainly reject physical doctrines of life. No one 

 can say liow minute the smallest particle may l:>e, that can 

 divide and subdivide, inherit and transmit its special life-power. 

 Many living particles that can be studied, being less than the 

 Y-(,-^o-jyth of an inch in diameter. 



Fifty years seems a reasonable time for a student and teacher 

 of more than one department of living nature, to have waited 

 for the criticism of intelligent contemporary critics, of 

 inferences he has been compelled to draw in the course of 

 minute research conducted in one of the most important 

 departments of science and human knowledge, having direct 

 bearing on our views of living nature, philosophy, and religion : 

 and therefore of the greatest interest to every person of 

 intelligence. 



The fact of being one of a rapidly diminishing number, I 

 regret to say, of the Senior Fellows of the Eoyal College of 

 Physicians and of the Royal Society, as well as of those of my 

 own college which was the scene of my being taught, and of my 

 teaching others, in minute Anatomy and Physiology, Pathology 

 and the Principles and Practice of ]\redicine, from 1837, almost 

 up to the present time — will I trust be received as an adequate 

 apology for again craving the attention of the members of the 

 Victoria Institute, to yet another dissertation on the difficult 

 problem, in regard of which there are irreconcilable differences 

 of opinion ; and with their permission, of appealing to the^ 



