260 TRANSACTIONS OF THE PLYMOUTH INSTITUTION. 
Nature abhors superfluous ways of effecting her ends as truly as 
she does a vacuum. It is true the production artificially of organic 
compounds, as yet, has been only indirect by successive combina- 
tions of simpler combinations, not directly out of the simple 
elements themselves ; but, to whatever extent this has been done, 
it serves as a finger-post to point to the truth that the word 
" vital " is only a name for those incidental forces which were 
found to be in action in all inorganic bodies, only that in the 
organic they assume a more complicated and unstable relation 
one to the other. The interaction of matter and force is the clue 
to all. 
Further, there is known to be but one formal hasis of life enter- 
ing into living things. That is, there is a certain definite physical 
combination which is known to be present where there is life, 
which is not present where there is not life, and which is the 
basis of all that is built up and done in connection with life, and 
which, in so far as we have any right to speak, is the only basis 
of whatever is covered by the term " Life." If there be any dis- 
tinctive property requiring designation by coining the word "Life," 
that property is simply the peculiarity exhibited by, and conse- 
quent solely on, a certain ascertainable combination of physical 
elements, much, as in the same way, we say that magnetism is a 
property of matter under given conditions. This, in brief, is 
the doctrine of Protoplasm or Bioplasm. It is really a develop- 
ment in a particular direction of the cell theory with which 
Professor Yirchow's name among others is associated. Haeckel, 
Schultze, and others have pushed the theory so far as to affirm 
that even the membrane and the nucleus are subordinate — the 
real thing being the intercellular matter. 8 That this Protoplasmic 
or Bioplasmic matter is the basis of all Life from the lowest to 
the highest is argued from the following facts : (1) The powers of 
all kinds of living matter, however diverse in degree, are sub- 
stantially similar in kind. In the lower organisms the same 
Protoplasm performs all the vital functions of feeding, growing, 
moving, multiplying. (2) The fundamental forms of all living 
matter are substantially the same. The spheroidal nucleus is 
the type rigidly adhered to. In the lowest living things the 
whole structure may consist of such a form, and the whole 
structure of the higher animals may consist of transformed shells 
8 Haeckel's History of Creation, i. p. 188. 
