
INAUGURAL ADDRESS. 19 
of view, as the word is ordinarily understood, is simply 
this: that in all chemical combination, double decom- 
position and recombination with formation of a third 
substance into which both factors enter in exact pro- 
portions are the rule; while here, when a chemical 
substance—pabulum (generally a complex compound)— 
is placed in contact with living matter, the latter is 
not decomposed, but on the contrary grows, while the 
pabulum is decomposed and its elements incorporated 
with the living matter as far as the latter requires. This 
faculty of renewing itself from heterogeneous matter has 
no parallel in the chemistry of non-living bodies, and is 
the distinguishing mark of protoplasm or living matter. 
It is trne that the chemical ferments and catalytic agents 
are not decomposed in the act of inducing chemical 
changes, but neither do they grow thereby as does the 
living matter. For these reasons it is obvious that no 
knowledge of the chemical relations of any substance with 
the proteids or any proximate principles found in proto- 
plasm after death, can afford the slightest clue to what 
may be its action during life, except perhaps coarsely 
destructive.* 
* As a test of a difference of chemical state between protoplasm in the 
living state and the same when dead, Dr. Loew has noticed that a weak - 
alkaline solution of nitrate of silver is reduced by the living but not by the 
dead protoplasm. Spirogyra, one of the lower Alge, acts in this way, reducing 
the silver salt when the protoplasm is living but not after its death.—Nature, 
8th October, 1885. 
Hanstein (Das Protoplasma, p. 243) states that living vegetable cells 
placed in watery solutions of various colouring matters allow the waters to 
diffuse through both the cell wall and the primordial utricle, but the colouring 
matter is stopped by the latter which consists of protoplasm as long as it is 
alive, while after death it is freely penetrated by many kinds of these same 
colouring matters. This shows palpably that in the act of death a change in 
the molecular constitution or arrangement of the protoplasm has taken place. 
Strasburger (Theilungs vorgang dev Zellkerne, p. 4) simply states that ‘‘ the 
