28 LIVERPOOL BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 
when we can trace back life to its essential physical basis, 
which we can see and handle, and find out that nothing 
ponderable escapes, nor is any force transferred or trans- 
formed from it at death; and, in fact, that in it nothing is 
discernible at death but a re-arrangement of chemical 
compounds? A substance likewise which we can test as 
to its proximate and ultimate elements, although we cannot 
put these together again, nor form an intelligible represen- 
tation as to how they are combined in the living state so as 
to re-act as they do on contact with the environment? I 
apprehend it is; and if we relegate to biology all those 
facts which are observed on living matter and those only, 
excluding rigidly every physical and chemical action on the 
non-living tissues and fluids, as well as on the proteids 
constituting the proximate principles found in protoplasm 
after death. Thus all the reactions of different kinds of 
matter from the simplest binary combinations up to the 
most complex so called organic compounds cognisable in 
the laboratory belong to chemistry as at present under- 
stood; while these reactions between protoplasm and the 
environment, not cognisable in the laboratory, except by 
their results, may be held to constitute physiology and 
bear the name of protoplasmic.* As we cannot explain 
why the different elements behave towards each other as 
* The term organic chemistry has been for long applied to that which deals 
with compounds synthetically formed through life, and which we could not set 
together from their elements in the laboratory. But since the formation of 
urea from the elements in 1828, so many so-called organic compounds can now 
be made in the laboratory that the term organic may be said to have lost its 
significance ; and it is time to divide all actions between the atoms or molecules 
of different bodies into chemical and protoplasmic as suggested above. Of 
course the word organised should not be used as synonymous with organic in 
the old chemical sense. Nevertheless, Hanstein (p. 8) speaks of starch as 
‘forganised’’ when arranging it among the metaplasmata, or materials formed 
by protoplasm. Such careless use of words induces endless confusion. 

