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in its results. So with animals. They require not only materials, but force 
stored up in their food with the materials, and they have to employ that in 
order to work out their ends. But, besides that, in the growth both of plants 
and animals, there is the vital power, the office of that vital power being to 
direct and control the physical power that it uses, and if it were not for that 
directing force the physical power would be ineffectual. We may take for 
example the cells of a plant, perfect in structure and chemical constituents. 
We may expose them to sunshine, give them carbonic acid and water, but 
still we fail to produce the slightest change in them. Yet we know that sun- 
shine produces a change in the living plant, but then there must be some 
faculty in the plant itself to enable it to use that sunshine. That is the vital 
power. The directive power which uses all these things, and brings out the 
results, is the vital force. That vital force is in its character essentially 
different from any physical force that we have any knowledge of. Physical 
force, so far as we know it, is measurable — that is to say, a certain amount 
of force is required to do a certain amount of work, and if you want more 
done you must get more force. Vital force, on the other hand, is immeasurable, 
so far as we can see. It is immeasurable, not simply in the sense that we 
cannot set limits to it, but it does not appear to work by measure at all. 
We take a single seed, and we have vital power enough in that to produce 
millions and millions of fresh plants. No vitality comes to that seed from 
matter or physical force, yet it has power to spread life to an illimitable 
extent. We know of no physical power that can do that ; and so no physical 
researches can help us to understand the rule of life. If we examine matter 
ever so closely, we never get nearer the origin of life. We may know more 
of its nature, but nothing of its origin. Physical science never has been and 
never will be able to tell us anything about it. The knowledge must come 
from somewhere else. I should like now to make one or two remarks on the 
latter part of the paper, concerning the development of life. How life has 
developed itself is a question entirely different from its nature and origin. 
Mr. Wheatley has used an argument with regard to new creations which I 
confess I am utterly unable to see the force of. He says, if we can show 
that some few creations have existed from the very beginning up to the pre- 
sent time unchanged, all necessity for a new creation is therefore done away 
with. How does it follow, because a certain number of species have been 
able to subsist through an infinite variety of circumstances unchanged, that 
all others should have done so too ? I should think the argument would be 
rather the other way. The fact that only a few of existing species can be traced 
to the beginning is to my mind a proof that there have been fresh creations. 
How does he account for the extinction of certain animals ? Because, he 
says, circumstances have altered. But on the same evidence we are bound to 
believe that others have come in. We find that animals which existed 
previously do not exist now, and we find that animals and plants exist now 
which did not exist ages ago. The argument cuts both ways, and we must 
believe that at certain periods fresh animals and plants have come into exist- 
ence, but whether by fresh creation or not is another question. We are 
