as the order of movement of the heavenly bodies,
which we compute backward to the days of the observatories on the plains
of Shinar, and on the faith of which we regulate the movements of war and
trade by the predictions of our ephemeris.

The mechanism, and that is all. We see the workman and the tools, but
the skill that guides the work and the power that performs it are as
invisible as ever. I fear that not every listener took the significance
of those pregnant words in the passage I quoted from John
Bell,--"thinking to discover its properties in its form." We have
discovered the working bee in this great hive of organization. We have
detected the cell in the very act of forming itself from a nucleus, of
transforming itself into various tissues, of selecting the elements of
various secretions. But why one cell becomes nerve and another muscle,
why one selects bile and another fat, we can no more pretend to tell,
than why one grape sucks out of the soil the generous juice which princes
hoard in their cellars, and another the wine which it takes three men to
drink,--one to pour it down, another to swallow it, and a third to hold
him while it is going down. Certain analogies between this selecting
power and the phenomena of endosmosis in the elective affinities of
chemistry we can find, but the problem of force remains here, as
everywhere, unsolved and insolvable.

Do we gain anything by attempting to get rid of the idea of a special
vital force because we find certain mutually convertible relations
between forces in the body and out of it? I think not, any more than we
should gain by getting rid of the idea and expression Magnetism because
of its correlation with electricity. We may concede the unity of all
forms of force, but we cannot overlook the fixed differences of its
manifestations according to the conditions under which it acts. It is a
mistake, however, to think the mystery is greater in an organized body
than in any other. We see a stone fall or a crystal form, and there is
nothing stranger left to wonder at, for we have seen the Infinite in
action.

Just so far as we can recognize the ordinary modes of operation of the
common forces of nature,--gravity, cohesion, elasticity, transudation,
chemical action, and the rest,--we see the so-called vital acts in the
light of a larger range of known facts and familiar analogies.
Matteuecci's well-remembered lectures contain many and striking examples
of the worki