


168 THE NORTHERN MICROSCOPIST. 

proportion of oxygen and hydrogen are very uncertain in the 
synthetic production of water ? 
If you heat a bar of platinum under certain fixed conditions, on 
two following days, you do not expect that it will indicate different 
powers of expansion, or melt at a lower temperature to-day than 
yesterday. A given musical note will depend on the same number 
of vibrations to-morrow as to-day. 
Yes. But it may be said all this applies to the inorganic world. 
Is it true of that which lives? Properly understood, I profoundly 
believe it is. 
What do we know of life? Only this with certainty :—that 
wherever you have life it is inherent in a definite compound. This 
compound has special and unique properties. But wherever you 
find it as protoplasm in the sense in which I use that word, it 
exhibits the properties of life, and you will nowhere find the 
properties of life except associated with, and inherent in, proto- 
plasm. 
Now, has this protoplasm an ascertainable composition? Yes ; 
you can analyse it chemically—that is when it is dead—and it is 
found that its chemical elements are everywhere practically alike. 
To say that the life-stuff of the lowest fungus, and that of the most 
powerful human brain, are identical, is, there is no doubt in some 
sense, absurd ; it is an abuse of language; they, without question, 
differ inconceivably. But if you consider only the chemical com- 
position, and discoverable physical properties of protoplasm from a 
mildew, or protoplasm from the apparatus of human thought, they 
are alike. ' Their difference is potential and not physically manifest. 
Then we may ask, “ How, and in what, do matter living and matter’ 
not living differ?” In their properties—and in these they differ as 
the finite and the infinite differ—absolutely and wholly. We may 
not dwell upon what they are; but we may add that even the 
chemical reactions of living protoplasm are quite different from 
those of the substance which represents the protoplasm, when its 
life is gone. 
Professor Huxley writes concerning protoplasm thus :—‘‘ The 
properties of living matter distinguish it absolutely from all other 
kinds of things; and,” he continues, “‘the present state of our 
knowledge furnishes us with no link between the living and the not 
living.”* 
Then, so far as the evidence will carry us, there is to-day in our 
laboratories, and in our facts from nature, no evidence of the exis- 
tence of spontaneous generation—no phenomena that prove, or 
even suggest, that what is not living can, without the intervention 
of living things, change itself into that which lives ? 

* Ency. Brit., vol. iii., page 679, 9th ed. 
