were guessing, he himself ventured to guess how the chasm between the not-living and the living might be bridged. Fifteen years ago, Dr. Lionel Beale did not stand as a lion in the way of such guessing. Owen put forward as a possible hypothesis that we shall find out some day that there is "molecular machinery" that accounts for the phenomena of life. He thinks life in its simplest forms may perhaps be compared to the power a magnet exerts when it attracts certain particles to itself, and rejects others. It seems to have the power of selection. You might say that the magnet is feeding itself to see how it draws up to itself metallic dust. But the reply to all that is, You may magnetize and demagnetize your poor iron any number of times; but kill once the smallest living organism, and there is no remagnetizing that. You may change your magnet from state to state, as you may change water to gases, and gases to water. You may braid and unbraid the threads of any inorganic whip-lash again and again, but once unbraid any living strands, and there is no braiding them together again forever. [Applause.]

16. That what the bioplasts effect in the transmutation of nutrient into living matter, and of the latter into formed material, chemistry can neither imitate nor explain.

You must not allow yourself to fall into doubt as to the attitude of materialistic philosophers on this proposition. Who is Häckel? He is a materialist. What is a materialist? One who denies that there is any spiritual substance in the universe, and affirms

that matter is the only thing that exists. Can Häckel believe in the immortality of the soul? It is a mild statement to say that he must be in grave doubt about it. Can Häckel believe in God? He says in so many words that "there is no God but necessity." What does Häckel affirm concerning the ability of chemistry to bridge the colossal chasm between the living and the not-living? That it is powerless to do so. That it is impotent to explain how inorganic is transmuted into organic matter. There is nothing in chemistry that can produce life. I asked a friend who lately took his degree in chemistry at Gottingen what was thought there about the possibility of producing in the laboratory any parallels to the action of the bioplasts. "We have given up," said he, "the idea that we can make things grow." “Most naturalists of our time," says Häckel, “are inclined to give up the attempt to account for the origin of life by natural causes" (History of Creation, vol. i. p. 327). DuBois Reymond says, "It is futile to attempt by chemistry to bridge the chasm between the living and the not-living."

In the bioplast occurs a change which is a sealed volume to the deepest physical science. Here is the not-living, and there is the living; and instantaneously the change of the former into the latter is effected. You look with your microscope upon the centre of the bioplast, and what do you see? Little germinal points arising in the centre, and enlarging. The bioplast seems to boil bioplasts from its centre. It moves. It divides itself here before our eyes

[illustrating on the blackboard]. It throbs. You watch it under your microscope. The viscid mass is throwing out a promontory here and a promontory there, against gravitation, and contrary to all we know of chemical force. Suddenly there come great inlets here and there; and soon your one bioplast has made of itself two bioplasts. Each of the new bioplasts continues to receive nutriment; and in its interior the mysterious transmutation of the notliving into the living, and the preparation of formed material, go on again. Each will divide again; and thus, little by little, we find formed matter woven at the edge of these creeping bioplasts into what? Nerve, bone, muscle, artery. We find the not-living changed into the living, and formed material thrown off how? So as to produce all the tissues of the body.

Your microscope demonstrates that the little bioplast has not only the throbbing movement, and power of self-multiplication, but of rectilinear movement also. Once this bioplast was here. It threw off formed material; and that formed material flows away behind it as your thread flows from your spindle. It flows away here as what? As an incipient nerve. But here another group of bioplasts spin, and a thread flows away-as what? As muscular fibre. There you weave your nerve, there your muscle, there your bone, and there your artery. The bioplasts move on; they convert constantly the nutrient material into living matter, and throw off formed material; and when at last this thread is

wound, it has a contractile quality. When that is wound, it has the power of transmitting what we call the nervous force; or, when the other is wound, it is the beginning of a bone: when this other, that is the commencement of an artery; or when this other, that is an incipient vein.

We stand in awe before this action of the bioplasts as incontrovertibly indicating intelligence somewhere. If you please, when the egg begins to quicken, must not the whole plan of your eagle, or of your lion, be kept in view from the first stroke of the shuttles? It is something to weave a nerve, is it not? It is enough to keep us on our knees to know that this little mass of colorless, viscid, and, under the microscope, apparently structureless matter, can weave osseous, muscular, and nervous fibres. But what if they can not only spin these different threads, but also weave them into warp and woof? I am putting before you facts that are not controverted at all. Dr. Carpenter adopts these views in the latest edition of his famous "Physiology." They are wholly authoritative statements of what goes on in every living tissue. Among materialists and anti-materialists, as they walk over this high table-land of science, there is, I assure you, my friends, unanimity as to essential facts at present; and by and by, perhaps, there will be unanimity as to inferences from facts. My belief is, that these facts should be put before all scholars, and not kept from the masses. [Applause.] The members of the legal, clerical, and literary professions, are trained in the logical method

as mercilessly as physicists are, and have a right to test reasoning, even where they cannot for themselves verify facts. When I stand here before lawyers, and before learned ministers, and before scholars better informed than I have had opportunity to be on these great themes, I feel, that, although not men of science, you have the right to test the reasoning of science. I am bringing to you here only what are conceded to be facts; and you are competent to test the logic of the facts. It is the right of every mind to look into the logic of whatever touches immortality, the soul, and all that is highest in human endeavor.

It is beyond contradiction that we know that these little points of structureless matter spin the threads, and weave the warp and woof, of organisms. But the bioplasts are of apparently just the same matter in the eagle and in the lion. You look into the centre of the egg of the eagle, and you will see a little mass of colorless, viscid substance, wholly structureless, so far as the highest power of the microscope can reveal its nature. But, when the egg begins to quicken, there is a different segmentation for each of the four great classes of animal forms. All eggs of the class of vertebrates, for instance, begin their development in the same way, and run on in the same way for a while; but your radiates begin another way, and your articulates another. Examined by all the physical tests known to science, bioplasm is the same, however, in your radiate, and articulate, and vertebrate.