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Transactions Texas Academy of Science. 
in inorganic nature. It is evidenced as such by the peculiar work it is 
performing, the work of functionally reintegrating the form and struc- 
ture of organic individuals. It may, therefore, safely be looked upon as 
a vital and formative energy, without losing its character as essentially 
a chemical process. 
If we now further ask what really constitutes the nature of chemical 
composition, we have to confess that this question transcends at present 
the limits of our knowledge. Suffice it to say, that, whatever theory we 
may form regarding the nature of so-called matter, chemical composition 
is clearly recognized as a mode of visible existence differing essentially 
from mere physical aggregation. It forms an integrant unit, in which 
all component elements are interdependently bound together by what is 
figuratively called chemical affinity. And it is certain that the specific 
modes of reaction of chemical compounds, which in the living substance 
display the wonderful qualitative manifestation that constitute its essen- 
tial characteristics; it is certain that these characteristic modes of reac- 
tion are eminently hypermechanical. 
Finally, a few more words regarding the unity of the organic indi- 
vidual. On the strength of my protoplasmic researches I have defended 
it, at first, single-handed against accepted aggregational theories. And 
I rejoice that foremost investigators are now reaching the same conclu- 
sion on different lines of research. In various publications, and also in 
articles which appeared in “Mind,” 1880, which articles I expressly en- 
titled “The Unity of the Organic Individual,” I have fully expounded 
this neovitalistic view. And I have also in the same articles explained 
the vital phenomena of assimilation, growth, and reproduction as result- 
ing from the power of living beings to regenerate themselves from frag- 
ments of this substance. In evidence of it, I beg leave to quote a few 
sentences: “Whoever has watched the division of highly differentiated 
infusoria with its exact duplication of every slightest detail of the com- 
plex organization ought to be aware that something very different from 
mere overgrowth is here conspicuously in operation. The upper half of 
the dividing animalcule has to reconstruct a lower half, and the lower 
half has to reconstruct an upper half. Evidently the same influence is 
here normally at work that repairs an organism when by accident it has 
lost one of its halves ; and growth itself can mean essentially nothing but 
repair or reconstruction of the generical type from some fraction of an 
individual.” Any portions of the unitary protoplasm of an organic indi- 
vidual, and especially its so-called germs, have to be considered in the 
strictest sense of the term, chemical radicals. Remove from a chem- 
ical compound a part of its integrant atoms; it is then no longer satu- 
rated, but represents a chemically disequilibrated residue with combining 
