22 
F. F. Blackman. 
INCIPIENT VITALITY. 
[An account of some recent work throwing light upon the Chemical 
Mechanism of the Cell.] 
By F. F. Blackman. 
H IS article is intended to supplement one entitled “Residual 
Vitality” which appeared in this Journal two years ago. 1 In 
the former article attention was drawn to the evidence that vitality 
is not the property of a single chemical substance, protoplasm, but 
is the attribute of a system of correlated substances, which sub¬ 
stances in themselves may be, in comparison with the whole system, 
quite simple in composition and attributes. It was shewn that a 
number of these units may be liberated by destruction of the 
system, even, under appropriate conditions, by the crude method of 
physical disintegration. A number of them have been grouped into 
one class, the enzymes, not because they produce the same sort of 
effects chemically, but because they all act in the same sort of way, 
as katalytic agents. It was further shown that the vital system 
must be a compound one, consisting of simple systems aggregated 
into more complex ones to several degrees, giving, as a result, a 
gradation of functions the higher of which may be suppressed 
without suspending the lower, while the lower cannot be stopped 
without suspending all the higher. As stages in such a sequence of 
functional manifestations, proceeding downwards, we may parti¬ 
cularise—irritability, growth, anabolism, respiration, enzyme-action. 
In death, by natural or artificial process, these functions often 
fail in sequence from above downwards, and if the progression is 
slow we have stages where the lower grades of the vital mani¬ 
festations alone co-exist. Such states, when they are maintained 
long enough to be experimentally demonstrable, may be entitled 
residual vitality and they gave title to the earlier article. 
At that time the point of view was purely analytical, dealing 
with the breaking down of the full manifestations of vitality and 
with the residual fragments so obtained. 
Now, there is enough analytical knowledge available to justify a 
first tentative attempt at synthetic treatment, and we may begin to 
speculate as to how the metabolic processes of the cell are adjusted 
as regards the rate at which they take place in life. 
The clues to this enquiry must be sought in the chemistry of 
the non-living, and the investigator must dare to ask why does not 
1 New Phytolooist, Vol. III., Feb. 1904. 
