293 
As to the God that made them -we do not recognise His existence, and are 
ignorant that professing themselves to be wise, certain persons became fools , 
which is a name likely to last as long as the scripture from which it is taken 
and is the proper distinctive term to be applied to us, if we are guilty of such 
egregious folly. 
Admitting that life ordinarily requires for its manifestation that great 
group of organic compounds which are known generally as the nitrogenous 
or azotised substances, and that these more or less closely approximate to 
albumen in chemical constitution, we may (if we like) apply the term proto- 
plasm with the same amount of accuracy (or inaccuracy) as in the former 
case we use the word clay. But take away life and you have nothing but 
a caput mortuum as a residuum. The carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, 
the iron silica, &c., are all there, but there is no longer any power of organi- 
zation. The brickmakers, the porcelain-makers, the designers, are all gone 
and Nature takes care that this refuse shall be disposed of in other ways. 
“ Imperious Caesar, dead and turned to clay, 
Might stop a hole to keep the wind away.” 
The albumen and proteine substances in an egg illustrate this part of my 
meaning. Every one knows that they are not dead refuse matter ; although 
unless quickened into independent life they speedily become so, and are 
resolved into other chemical compounds. And the life, whence comes it ? 
Certainly not from some iuherent “ molecular movements of extreme chemi- 
cal complexity ! ” 
I have shown in my “ Addendum to the Contrast between Crystallization 
and Life ” how this subject is intentionally mystified, for the object of main- 
taining the doctrine of evolution ; and how, whilst it is admitted that the 
cell theory is misleading, it is again and again brought to the front. To 
assert a fallacy and to re-assert it, in spite of all argument which cannot bo 
faced but must be ignored — this passes for science ! And we must get rid of 
fanaticism in science as well as in religion, if there is to be any reconciliation 
between them ; for in all cases fanatical adherence to a system leads to a 
want of truthfulness of statement, and whilst it enlists partisans destroys all 
accuracy of research. 
I cannot but regret that in the midst of so much that is excellent, as a 
resumt of the present state of scientific knowledge, Dr. Nicholson should 
have failed to define a more striking point than any of the three which he 
has recorded (at pp. 277, 278) in discussing the essential phenomena of all 
living bodies as opposed to those that are dead. 
Kant has well said that “the cause of the particular mode of existence of 
a living body resides in the whole” ; and Muller, that “ there is in living or 
organic matter a principle constantly in action, the operations of which are 
in accordance with a rational plan, so that the individual parts which it 
creates in the body are adapted to the design of the whole — and this it is 
which distinguishes organism” 
It is this principle, residing in the whole, to which our author gives the 
VOL. XIV. X 
