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oxygen, and nitrogen.” You find there that Dr. Odling denies the existence 
of vital force altogether. I think we are much indebted to Mr. Warington 
for pointing out so clearly the difference between vital force and physical 
power. Suppose a chemist can build up so much flesh, or artificially make 
so much wood or so much quinine, does he get any nearer to an organic body, 
or to organic life ? There is no structure in these things. If he builds up 
the flesh he does not produce a living body — a something endowed with 
something else, call it vital force, or power, or anything else, which renders 
it capable of perpetuating itself. It is marvellous that this something should 
be capable of taking all the powers of inorganic nature — sunlight and heat 
and all the other elements — and building them up so as to perpetuate 
other creatures through all time. You have nothing approaching that — 
nothing at all like that force anywhere else. No one could have stated 
that more clearly than Mr. Warington, and it is essentially one of the points 
in dispute. I was in hope that somebody would have told us more about 
physiology. Years ago I attended a course of lectures, delivered at the 
College of Surgeons by Mr. Paget, on the “ Life of the Blood.” Hunter 
was not ashamed when he wrote on inflammation to go to one Book, and 
he took the passage that “ the life was in the blood ” as the motto for his 
work, and I do not believe he got beyond it. Mr. Paget stated most lucidly 
in his lectures that it was impossible to give any scientific definition of life which 
would hold water — such a definition, for instance, by which we would be 
enabled to show it differs from everything inorganic. I was somewhat in- 
terested in those lectures, and it was through them that I was led to devote 
my spare time to the investigation of the science of crystallography. Mr. 
Paget said that the nearest approach you could get to a definition of life was 
that of a German, whose name I forget, that a living body was that which, 
when injured, was capable of repairing the injury. But, he continued, ac- 
cording to that, a crystal of alum was a living body, and he exhibited the 
model of an alum crystal as it was when it had been broken, and another 
model showing how it had repaired the injury when put again into the solu- 
tion where it was originally formed. The first model represented the broken 
crystal, the second showed a perfect octohedron. The crystal, therefore, 
according to that definition, was a living body. I wanted to know how it 
was that the crystal could thus repair an injury of itself. He said that the 
discovery had lately been made by a German, but I afterwards found 
it was in Mrs. Somerville’s Introduction to the Physical Sciences , and 
that it was not a new discovery at all, but an old one revived. Although we 
cannot define life, there is the widest difference between a living creature of 
any kind and a dead carcase. In the body without life there is no per- 
petuation of growth, as there is in the living animal of the lowest or most im- 
perfect type. It was held at first to be a mistake on the part of Liebig and 
others, who supposed it was possible for the chemist to make the combina- 
tions found in living bodies by means of inorganic elements, but it is true. 
Still it does not bring you one step nearer to making the living body. It 
was well known before, that phosphate of lime could be procured from bones, 
