lowest manifestations of vegetable life — you can make motion of heat and 
electricity, but when you come to vital force, |as in a plant, you can do 
nothing of the kind. Vegetable tissue decomposes carbonic acid as carbonic 
acid is not to be decomposed in our laboratories. Look at that fact. Every 
leaf of every weed, or herb, or moss, or lichen, shows that when the first 
particle of vegetable matter was seen in the world, there had come some- 
thing which could not be produced by any other means than its own 
growth and propagation. Professor Huxley says : “ I see no break : there 
is unbroken continuity” ; but there was a break, for you come to a time when 
vegetable tissue was first called into existence, and that vegetable tissue 
could act upon carbonic acid as nothing else ever could or ever did. Take 
protoplasm, which Professor Huxley says cannot be made except by contact 
with antecedent life. You talk of the protogenes of Haeckel, and tell me 
that they are the first embodiments of the power which we call vitality. 
Here, then, is the fount of the power which we call vital force, and which is 
not chemical nor mechanical. From your protogenes to man there is no 
break, but still there is no such thing in rerum naturd as life in animal or 
plant except through antecedent life! To the protogenes I say, “You are 
the first things that lived. Did you inherit your life ? Was it handed 
down to you ? ” “ No,” they reply, “ or we should not be protogenes.” 
“And yet you are alive?” “Yes.” “But there is no such thing as 
living without protoplasm, and protoplasm does not exist except by con- 
nection with antecedent life.” (Loud cheers.) Therefore these protogenes 
are and are not alive, and I leave it to the other side to settle that 
question. 
Eev. Principal Saumarez Smith, B.D. — I am not going to address you at 
any length to-night, and indeed it would be unnecessary to make many 
remarks because of the long and interesting speech which we have just 
heard from Dr. Wainwright, as a comment on Mr. Pattison’s interesting 
paper. But I should like to add one illustration from a book, which I have 
lately been perusing, by a German professor — I think a Roman Catholic 
theological professor — entitled, The Bible History of Creation and its Rela- 
tion to the Results of Natural Science. Now I think the point is a good 
one to illustrate the subject of a paper on nature’s limits. Professor Reusch 
says, with reference to the assumption made that the beginning of all 
things was an enormous mass of gas extended through space, — that 
physical science, taking its results, knows only of four ways in which 
that presumed first matter could be condensed or consolidated: (1) by 
external pressure, (2) by the property of gravitation, (3) by chemical attrac- 
tion, and (4) by a lowering of the temperature ; and then he shows that none 
of these agencies could have produced the required result in the gas itself, 
except through some force besides matter and outside space. Therefore, you 
have the argument of the paper, that the limit of nature which you get by 
these processes, necessarily postulates something outside nature which you 
