
INAUGURAL ADDRESS. JF 
it becomes changed, and we examine not the actual living 
growing matter itself, but the substances which result 
from its death. We are compelled to conclude that the 
living matter is composed of the sum of the elements 
found immediately after death, combined or associated in 
some unknown manner peculiar to itself. In the words 
of Dr. Beale, “It seems probable that during this tem- 
porary living state the elements do not exist in a state 
of ordinary chemical combination at all. These ordinary 
attractions or affinities seem to be suspended for the 
time.”’ 
A similar view had already been set forth a quarter of a 
century before, in Fletcher’s ‘‘ Physiology,’ where it is 
stated (p. 133), that none of the proximate principles are 
contained in the living matter, ‘but only the same 
elements as these compounds contain associated and 
held together by a power quite distinct from common 
chemical affinity in a state of combination peculiar to 
living matter; and that it is only at the instant of the 
cessation of the vitality of each organised tissue that 
these compounds are formed—at that instant when the 
power called chemical affinity succeeds another power, 
which may be called vital affinity, and by which it had 
_ been previously superseded, and common chemical com- 
pounds are all that is left of that organised mass into 
which the elements had been before associated.” He is 
careful to add, that this “power called vital affinity’’ is 
not dependent on any essence or force added to the living 
matter, but is simply the property of matter in that state 
of combination, just as sweetness is of sugar. 
_ We have seen also that Schwann, in 1839, held that 
“the source of the organic phenomena can only reside in 
_ another combination of the materials.” Herbert Spencer 
also is compelled to frame the hypothesis of an ulterior 
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