EDITORIAL OBSERVATIONS. 
87 
and, we hope, a lawful inquiry, and to enter upon it demands a 
knowledge of several branches of natural philosophy. An in¬ 
vestigation into the nature of the vital principle, or What is 
life? is one that has from time immemorial agitated theminds of 
philosophers, but without any satisfactory result, and perhaps 
it will remain unsolved for evermore- ’Tis a dark and in¬ 
explicable problem. A public writer states that he once knew 
(( a philosopher—one of the profoundest as well as one of the 
most modest thinkers that our age or country has produced— 
who devoted many years of his life to the discovery of the 
principle of vitality. What was his confession at last? 
Simply that he had been wasting his time ; for that the further 
he advanced into the unfathomable recesses of nature, the 
more hopeless did the search appear. The reason is obvious, 
if our pride would only permit us to make the discovery. It 
is simply an attempt to compress the ocean into a nutshell. 
Man’s mind, regarded in itself, is an instrument of rare capacity 
and beauty, with which it is possible to achieve much, and to 
unravel many things which at first sight seem to defy our 
utmost efforts ; but when from our proper sphere we pass out 
into the infinite, and attempt to grasp truths which the 
Omniscient has obviously reserved to Himself, we merely 
display our feebleness and our folly.” 
A high authority, referring to this subject, has said: 
“ I conceive it may be affirmed to be in strict keeping 
w ith inductive philosophy that, as the living body is admittedly 
composed of the common elements of matter, and as these 
elements are in most organic substances combined in strict 
accordance with the laws of chemical affinitv, that—as in 
a multitude of instances to which the exact science of the 
present day is continually adding—it is recognised by all 
that the actions of the living; body are either chemical or 
n -j 
physical in their character, so, in reality, it is proved by the 
operation of physical forces, and that all the so-called vital 
actions are as essentially dependent upon these same 
powers. Views like these, as many well know r , have at 
various epochs been enunciated with greater or less precision, 
but nothing has been firmly established ; w hilst, on the other 
hand, volumes have been written to prove that the phenomena 
of living bodies are altogether peculiar, and depending on 
forces to which there is nothing analogous in common matter. 
Even in the case of those processes which obviously are 
closely allied to chemical and physical phenomena, physiolo¬ 
gists spoke of them as altogether peculiar and vital. Hem*e so 
