


INAUGURAL ADDRESS. 93 
“All that is essential in the cell or elementary part is 
matter that zs in the living state, germinal matter, and 
matter that was in the living state, formed material; 
with these is usually associated a certain proportion of 
matter about to become living, the pabulum or food.”’ 
He lays the greatest stress on the abundance of access or 
privation of the pabulum in the causation of changes of 
nutrition in health and disease, but takes little account of 
the two other departments of the environment. The 
primary importance and in fact essentiality of pabulum 
cannot of course be diminished in the smallest degree ; 
and the very name of pabulum shows the very peculiar 
and exceptional relation subsisting between protoplasm 
and ordinary chemical compounds; and the radical dif- 
ference which exists between it and that which obtains 
between two non-living compounds which react chemically 
with each other. No one talks of, say, alkalies forming 
the food of acids, or implies in any way that one of these 
agents can grow in mass by decomposing and appropriating 
what it requires of the elements of the other, without 
being at the same time decomposed. 
The conditions and the stimuli are likewise essential to 
the process of life. Under conditions we must include 
chiefly heat, moisture, and the maintenance of the proper 
state of osmosis. Heat we must place in the category of 
conditions, for we have no reason to suppose that external 
heat is transformed and used in vital processes, but rather 
that it acts as temperature in bringing about and main- 
taining a state of molecular velocities and repulsion 
necessary for the protoplasmic and chemical processes of 
the living body, as it is for many chemical reactions. It 
is true we find in Hermann’s “‘ Physiology,’’ one passage 
which states, that part of the kinetic energy used in 
reducing the carbonic acid and ammonia of their food is 
