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nature does evoke regularity of shapes from the shapeless, and that man 
can imitate nature with her own materials. It is quite true. Nature’s only 
regular form is the crystal ; and though there are several primaries, and a 
multitude of secondaries, they are all solid bodies, having plane and smooth 
surfaces.” That is not absolutely true. There are a few crystals with curved 
surfaces — the diamond has curvilinear faces. Why the diamond and one or 
two others should present that variation is not quite clear, but that is the 
fact. With regard to the quotation which Mr. Wheatley has given from Dr. 
Odling, I may say that Dr. Odling’s argument has been entirely mistaken ; 
he actually denies the existence of vital force altogether. His language is 
exceedingly ambiguous ; but when you look at the list of the subjects of the 
various paragraphs of Lecture IV., you will find the words “ baseless hypo- 
thesis of vital force,” and in the text he says that there is no such thing in exist- 
ence. His view is that you have no right to say that you have any different 
force acting on the body, in order to combine the materials, but those forces 
which act in nature upon inorganic bodies, — that because the chemist can 
imitate some of the results of dead matter, a thing until lately deemed to 
be impossible, because he can make acetic acid and other things without 
using any organic matter, you have no reason to believe in vital force. 
He says that “ all the actions of the animal body are traceable to cosmical 
force ; that in living, as in dead matter, there is no creation of force ; and 
that any explanation of the phenomena of life which recognizes the agency 
of vital force is simply no explanation at all. Applying the word ‘ force,’ as 
we now do, to certain transferable states of actual or potential activity having 
quantitative metamorphic correlations, I much question whether the ex- 
pression ‘ chemical force ’ is a correct one, though it is one of which the mean- 
ing is perfectly definite and intelligible. By the chemical force of so much 
oxygen and hydrogen, for instance, we mean the potential energy stored up 
in them at the moment of their separation, and reproducible from them in the 
act of their combination. Similarly, we might apply the phrase ‘vital force’ 
to the potential energy of so much fat or muscle, capable by oxidation of 
being manifested in the form of external heat or motion. But what the 
physiologist means by vital force I have never been able to understand. So 
far as I can make it out, it seems to be a sort of internal, intransferable, im- 
measurable, self-originating power, which performs nutritive acts by its 
absolute will and pleasure, as if it were not abundantly manifest that the 
growth of a plant and incubation of an egg cannot be performed without a 
direct supply, and the development of animal organisms without an indirect 
supply of external force.” Further on, speaking of the question of making 
organic matter by chemical processes, he says, “ This question, decided abso- 
lutely in the negative, so long as the fiction of vital force tyrannized over men’s 
minds, has of late years received a rapid succession of brilliant affirmative 
replies. Already hundreds of vegetable compounds, heretofore produced only 
in living organisms, and, as was supposed, put together and held together by 
vital force, have been formed by the chemist in his laboratory out of carbonic 
acid, water, and ammonia ; or, in other words, out of charcoal, hydrogen, 
