LIFE-HISTORIES AND THEIR LESSONS. 167 

the world just now; men who, with all the necessary mental en- 
dowments and training, are, with the most splendid lenses the 
world can produce, working amongst the mazes of this wonderful 
margin and edge of living things. They are trying to individualise 
the components of the apparently confused mass, and make out 
the life-histories of these minutest of living things. And they are 
slowly succeeding. Life-history after life-history is being drawn by 
resolve and patience from the depths of the confusion :—and with 
what result? Everywhere, where the work has been exhaustively 
done, with the affirmation that Biological processes amongst the 
least and lowest living things are as orderly rigid, and within certain 
limits, as capable of predication, as amongst the Butterflies or the 
Entomostraca. 
Here are men, forever working amongst forms of life, similar to, 
or identical with, those brought before us in the papers the 
inferences of which I seek to controvert. But they use far higher 
magnifying power, and pursue another method of research essentially 
exact; do they reach like results? Do they infer that one form of 
minute life may transform itself into another? ‘That the protoplasm 
from a cell of Chara or Nitella may become, of its own caprice, or 
by some hidden law, and without the intervention of parent or egg, 
a Parameecian ? 
Verily, no! The testimony of Balbiani, Pasteur, Van Beneden, 
Biitchli, Fol, Haeckel, Huxley, Pelletan, Asa Gray, Louis Agassiz, 
H. J. Clarke, W. Roberts, Balfour, Ray Lankester, Ewart, and a 
host of others is unanimous—and it is this—that wherever we work 
out a minute life-history thoroughly, we come upon as orderly a 
process of nature as in the development of a frog or the growth, 
from its fertilised germ, of a primrose. 
All this of course is no reason why others should not find what 
is, or what seems to be, uncertainty or caprice in the lower strata 
of vital action in nature. Only that they should do so, implies a 
method of research either inconceivably higher, and more analytical, 
than that adopted by these leaders of research in minute Biology ; 
or else it can be explained as error arising from a method not 
competent to cope with the conditions of the problem. 
Approach the question of vital action as displayed by Protoplasm 
fairly, What is that in natnre which, above all things, impresses 
us as we study the phenomena, and the results of her countless 
cycles of activity? The stability of her processes ; and the mathe- 
matical precision of her action. Does anyone doubt the invariable 
and inviolable nature of the laws that control chemical combination 
and physical phenomena? Would any amount | of paradox or 
perplexity that might arise in complex experiment induce a man to 
believe that the proportions of carbon and oxygen which constitute 
carbonic acid are uncertain and capricious? or that the combining 
