lution and evolution are a fixed equation. If these multiplex molecules and their merely mechanical actions, which Spencer says build the body, have no life behind them, you will get no life out of them. [Applause.] If the smaller units out of which he makes up his larger units have no life in them, you will obtain from the latter only what was in the former.

Let us be forever sure that the law of the persistence of force requires that evolution and involution should be equal to each other. You will get out of your molecular units what you put into them, and nothing more. But, according to Spencer himself, the chemical and physical forces and properties of atoms cannot build an organism. Larger molecular masses made up of these units, he says, may do so. Not unless there can be more evolved from, than is involved in, these units. If involution and evolution are not an eternal equation, there may be an effect without a cause. You cannot evolve any thing which you have not first involved. Huxley, Spencer, Bain, and Drysdale, all admit, that, if you make up your compounds from all the ascertained molecular activities, you involve nothing that will account for the weaving of these complex tissues. That admission is fatal to their further pretence, that a combination can be made which will evolve what has not been involved. [Applause.]

But Dr. Drysdale, who is a candid Scotch writer, makes a most distinct admission, that, even after we have built up these complicated molecular units, the

Dr.

matter in them must be inert. Hear the authority of a man who opposes Beale's opinion, that the action of the bioplasts cannot be accounted for except by a higher than physical cause, and who seriously undertakes, while admitting Beale's facts, to persuade the world that this matter in the bioplasts is of an infinitely peculiar sort, and that all it needs is "stimulus" to set it at work in all this miraculous weaving and inweaving and co-ordination of tissues. Drysdale says in so many words (Protoplasmic Theory of Life, p. 199), "No matter how complex the protoplasmic molecule may be, its atoms are still nothing but matter, and must share its properties for good or evil, and among the rest inertia. Hence it cannot change its state of motion nor rest without the influence of some force from without. True spontaneity of movement is, therefore, just as impossible to it as to what we call dead matter. . . . So we are compelled to admit the existence of an exciting cause in the form of some force from without to give the initial impulse in all vital actions. This is the” What? The soul? We expect him to say that; but what he says is, "This is the stimulus," whatever that may mean. [Laughter.]

It is very surprising, in view of the school of thought to which Professor Alexander Bain of Aberdeen belongs, that, in his work on "The Senses and the Intellect" (p. 64), he should go so far as to uphold the doctrine of the spontaneity of vital actions, and to maintain that a spontaneous energy resides in the nerve-centres which gives them the power of initi

ating molecular movements without any antecedent sensation from without, or emotion from within, or any antecedent state of feeling whatever, or any stimulus extraneous to the moving apparatus itself. This fact of spontaneous energy he regards as the essential prelude to voluntary power.

So much, gentlemen, for the latest concessions of materialists; but I hold in my hand here the best, or certainly the freshest, book in the world on the "Cellular Theory;" and what are its opening words? All medical students in this audience will know that Professor Heinrich Frey of Zurich is a great authority on the cell-theory, and that this book of his has had an enormous sale between the Alps and the Baltic. Frey's work on "Microscopic Technology" is placed side by side with Stricker's "Histology" in the reading recommended to the two hundred young men in the Harvard Medical School yonder; but fresher than either of these books is this new volume published by Frey in 1875.

Rufus Choate, as you remember, used sometimes to lay out a course of study in the classics perfectly parallel with that of the young men in Harvard University, and, in his breathless profession, would keep pace with them year after year. What if a student of religious science, who has no right to know any thing about physiology, should look at the text-books in use in Harvard Medical School on physiology and other topics, and by this means, and by considerable conversation with men of science, assuring himself that he is not reading rubbish, and with a profes

sional medical library at his command, should follow side by side the investigations those highly privileged young men are pursuing yonder, and occasionally stand with them in their dissecting-rooms? I know at least one student of religious science who does precisely that, and is fascinated with his work. Biology is now quite as interesting as the classics. In your Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, studies are elective; and about ninety out of one hundred of the students there elect biology as one of their subjects.

Professor Frey of Zurich, in this work, which is hardly dry from the press, prints, face to face with the world, these as his very first sentences: "A deep abyss separates the inorganic from the organic, the inanimate from the animate. The rock-crystal on the one side, vegetable and animal on the other: how infinitely different the image! Is it, then, possible to bridge over this gulf? We answer, Not at the present time." [Applause.] We turn on in this volume, and find that reference is made to the theory that vital transformations are much like crystallization, and that then these remarks are made, with a very apparent and not undeserved sly smile:

"Schwann, the founder of modern histology, taught, What the crystal is in regard to the inorganic, that the cell is in the sphere of life. As the former shoots from the mother lye, so, also, in a suitable animal fluid, are developed the constituents of the cell, nucleolus, nucleus, covering, and cell contents. This view was embraced during many years,

it explained every thing so conveniently. This was, however, over-hasty. The cell arises from the cell. A spontaneous origin does not occur" (FREY, PROFESSOR HEINRICH, Compendium of Histology, Twentyfour lectures. Translated by Dr. G. R. Cutter. New York: Putnam's Sons, 1876. Pp. 1, 14). All this is in accord with what Huxley says in his article in "The Encyclopedia Britannica," "There is no parallel between the actions of matter in the mineral world and in living tissues."

2. After the unanimity of experts, there is no higher authority on any scientific doctrine than to find it taught in standard text-books in schools of the first rank; but you may easily ascertain that the very latest standard text-books oppose the mechanical or materialistic theory of life.

Dr. Tyson's book on "The Cell Doctrine" is in use side by side with Frey in your Harvard Medical School; but Tyson opens with diagrams from Beale, and closes with Beale; and where is there any thing in him that is regarded as invulnerable, that he did not obtain from Beale? Over and over, in the latter half of the book, as he closes the history of the thirty-nine years since the cell-theory was promulgated, he cites Beale; and, in spite of all the sneers from Huxley and others about "aquosity and horologity," he sums up established science thus, "We believe that the proper shaping, arrangement, and function of these elementary parts, is not a process identical or analogous to crystallization, taking place through merely physical laws, but that there is a presiding