7G 
Dr. Beale, on Nutrition. 
that there exists a sharp and well-defined difference between 
living and non-living things. And in spite of all that has 
been advanced to the contrary during the past ten years, it 
seems to me certain that matter which is alive is in a condi- 
tion essentially different from non-living matter. I shall 
endeavour to show that living matter alone is nourished, and 
that no non-living thing yet discovered experiences nutrition. 
W e shall see that the act of nutrition involves much more 
than the mere addition of new particles of matter to a mass 
which already exists, as some have held. Growth resulting 
from nutrition is so very different in its essential nature from 
every kind of increase resulting from deposition or aggrega- 
tion, that it seems to me wrong to apply the word “ growth ” 
to the process of increase in these two cases, and if the term 
is to be employed at all, I think it ought to be restricted to 
living things only. Here, however, at the outset, I find my- 
self distinctly at issue with one whose opinions on such 
questions are entitled to our respect. At the same time I 
cannot help feeling that if the author had observed more for 
himself, and trusted less to the arbitrary dicta and inconclusive 
statements of others upon elementary questions of the highest 
importance, but which have been very imperfectly worked 
out, he would have been led to adopt conclusions strangely 
at variance with the doctrines to which he has, I venture to 
think, prematurely committed himself. After affirming that 
the increase in size of the plant, like the crystal, is effected 
by continuously integrating surrounding like elements with 
itself, Mr. Herbert Spencer says* that the food of an animal 
is “ a portion of the environing matter that contains some 
compound atoms like some of the compound atoms constitu- 
ting its tissues.” If such be so, the peculiar substances of 
which white fibrous tissue, yellow elastic tissue, muscle, 
nerve, epithelium, &c., consist, ought to be present in the 
white and yolk of an egg before these have undergone conver- 
sion into the chick ; but we know that not one of these things 
can be detected, and, in short, that development and growth 
are processes essentially and absolutely different from the 
mere deposition in a solid form of particles previously held in 
solution in a fluid. In growth the substances dissolved in 
the fluid pabulum are completely altered in composition and 
properties. Their elements are entirely re-arranged. If 
the elements of the dissolved crystalline matter were torn 
asunder and then reunited in a different way, so as to 
produce a new substance when deposited in a solid form, 
crystallisation would in this one particular accord with 
* ‘ The Principles of Biology/ vol. i, p. 108. 
