84 
Dr. Beale, on Nutrition. 
tially from every other known change is this : the composi- 
tion and properties of the nutrient matter are completely 
altered, its elements are entirely rearranged, so that com- 
pounds which may be detected in the nutrient matter are no 
longer present when this has been taken up by the matter to 
be nourished. The only matter capable of effecting such 
changes as these is living matter, and it is very remarkable 
that when this matter ceases to live, we do not detect 
amongst the compounds formed at its death substances pre- 
viously present in the pabulum, but new bodies altogether, 
and these often vary according to the circumstances under 
which the matter dies. 
Desirous as I am to yield all that can be yielded to those 
who maintain that there are no vital powers distinct from 
ordinary force, I might say that a particle of soft transj^arent 
matter, called by some living, which came from a pre-exist- 
ing particle, effected, silently and in a moment, without appa- 
ratus, with little loss of material, at a temperature of 60° or 
lower, changes in matter, some of which can be imitated in 
the laboratory in the course of days or weeks by the aid of a 
highly skilled chemist, furnished with complex apparatus and 
the means of producing a very high temperature and intense 
chemical action, with an enormous waste of material. It is, 
therefore, quite obvious that an independent, scientific man 
must, for the present, hold that the operations by which 
changes are effected in substances by living matter, are in 
their nature essentially different from those which man is 
obliged to employ to bring about changes of a similar kind 
out of the body ; and until we are taught what the agent or 
operator in the living matter really is, it is better to call it 
vital power than to deny its existence altogether. 
It seems to me childish, rather than philosophical, on the 
part of any one to reassert in these days that nutrition is merely 
a chemical operation, unless he can imitate by chemical means 
the essential phenomena which take place when any living 
thing is nourished. The passage of a fluid through a tissue 
by which its structure is preserved is not nutrition, or the in- 
troduction of preservative fluids into dead tissues w^ould be a 
nutritive operation. A fluid may hold in solution certain 
substances which are separated from it as it traverses the 
tissue, thus adding to its weight and altering its properties, 
as occurs when calcareous and other slightly soluble sub- 
stances are deposited in the soft matrix of bone, teeth, shell, 
and other textures. This is a process which can be made to 
take place in lifeless matter, and has been adduced in support 
of the doctrine that the tissues of plants and animals are 
