77 
“ The electric shock we now know does not discharge particles of some 
peculiar substance, called ‘ the fluid of electricity,’ through that body which 
is rendered a lifeless mass by it in less than a second of time. It communi- 
cates only such a motion as absorbs that other motion which we call Life, 
and leaves that stagnation which we call Death.” 
Then he has another passage very much in the same way : — 
u This is in perfect accordance with all that true science teaches, though 
not the result of unaided human inquiry, such as claims the monopoly of 
being that science. In the lowest specimen of human kind there is a life, 
or movement of spirit that is specific in the highest sense of the term — a 
movement which rises to the Creator Himself, and marks Him out as the 
object of either love or fear.” 
From these passages I believe Professor Kirk has some peculiar notions of 
that motion which he calls life, and no doubt he does hold that motion to be 
something essentially and totally distinct from inanimate motion, or the 
motion of inanimate matter. That, I think, is fully borne out by another 
passage, which better explains his meaning * — 
“ I am not sure about his ‘ evidence ’ of a state of the earth when it was 
impossible for living beings of any sort to exist on it ; but I am fully con- 
vinced with him that there was a time when life began, and that He who 
gave it origin gives it continuity.” 
I am afraid that perhaps Mr. Kirk has narrowed his subject somewhat too 
much by the endeavour to make it purely metaphysical. He has uncon- 
sciously followed in the same track, traversed in another way by Professor 
Huxley, who, in the current number of the Fortnightly Review, has given a 
paper on “ The Physical Basis of Life,” or “ protoplasm,” which paper 
contains the substance of one of the Sunday evening lectures, delivered in 
Edinburgh to teach men science, “ in order to take away some portion of the 
ignorance and misery existing in the world.” When we see such an announce- 
ment we are curious to ascertain what is the sort of Sunday teaching which 
these men are taught in order to take away that ignorance and remedy that 
misery. But what do I find the whole of that teaching, so far as this par- 
ticular lecture is concerned, to be ? Simply this, that if you go into the 
lowest forms of life, whether yon find it in the sting of the nettle or in the 
humblest forms of vegetable life, which indeed you can hardly call life except 
for its motion and powers of propagation, and when you ultimately get down 
to the very lowest form of life — to the living being, which is the very nearest 
approach to that which is not living— -you come to what Professor Huxley 
calls “ protoplasm,” which, a little while ago, was only known as the homo- 
geneous fluid lining the inside of the cell of a plant. We are now taught 
that that is “ the physical basis of life ; ” that there is not one single particle 
of our whole body, or of any part of our body, which was not, at one time or 
another, a protoplasm, and that that is the essential unity of life found per- 
vading all creation. Then he goes on to tell us that there are two kinds of 
