Monthly Microscopical"! 
Journal, March 1, 1869. J 
Magnetic and Amoebal Phenomena. 
179 
have weight with any one who has seen an amoeba moving ? Is 
such a person hkely to be convinced that there is any true analogy 
whatever between its movements and those exerted by a magnet ? 
But I will allow Professor Owen much more than he will venture 
to accept, and shall yet be able to show that there is no true 
analogy between the amoeba and the magnet. If the magnet moved 
itself from place to place ; if it divided and multiplied ; if every part 
of it were capable of moving in every direction ; if it were able to 
select salts of iron, and then decomposed these and appropriated the 
iron to itself, so that, from a very little magnet, it grew into a big 
one, there would still be no real analogy between it and an amoeba ; 
because you can magnetize and unmagnetize the steel as many 
times as you like, but you cannot revitalize an amoeba once defunct. 
If you were to take a quantity of dead matter of defimct amoebse, 
and place it near a living amoeba, it would not be reanimated. 
The living amoeba might take up, bit by bit, the products of 
disintegration, and thus increase ; but this is a very different thing 
from vitalizing a ma^^s of organic matter as a mass of steel may be 
magnetized. Dead amoebal matter cannot be induced to live under 
circumstances at all parallel with those under which the " defunct " 
steel can be remagnetized. We are therefore compelled to conclude 
that the amoebal phenomena are different in their very nature from 
the magnetic phenomena. 
Looking from this point of view, it is not at present "conceivable 
that the same Cause which has endowed His world with power 
convertible into magnetic, electrical, thermotic, and other forms or 
modes of force, has also added the conditions of conversion into the 
vital mode." The question is still open, and the analogy sup- 
posed to exist between vital and magnetic, electrical, thermotic, and 
other forms or modes of ordinary force, has yet to be shown. If 
the magnet is the closest analogy that can be drawn between non- 
vital and vital actions, very little advance, it must be admitted, 
has been made during the last fifty years. Professor Owen is 
surely injuring the cause he hopes to serve. The Egyptian 
priests, in referring the origin of the universe to a single Egg, 
were far wiser in their generation, because in those days no one 
could prove that the universe did not so originate ; while in these 
days people who can examine magnets and amoebae will soon con- 
vince themselves that there is no analogy whatever between the 
magnetized steel and the active, living, moving, organic substance 
they see extending different parts of itself in many directions at the 
same instant. 
Between amoebal phenomena and mammalian phenomena there 
is a close analogy ; for, at the earliest period of being, the phenomena 
of a mammal might be truly described as amoehal. On the other 
hand, magnetic actions exhibit no closer an analogy to the amoebal 
