s not back the smallest quantity of
organic substance to the soil. Whence comes the hay, if not from the
atmosphere."

It has been seen, then, that plants can manufacture protoplasm, a
faculty which animals are not possessed of; they at best can only
convert dead protoplasm into living protoplasm. Thus when vegetable or
meat is cooked their protoplasm dies, but is not rendered incompetent of
resuming its old functions as a matter of life. "If I," says Huxley,
"should eat a piece of cooked mutton, which was once the living
protoplasm of a sheep, the protoplasm, rendered dead by cooking, will be
changed into living protoplasm, and thus I would transubstantiate sheep
into man; and were I to return to my own place by sea and undergo
shipwreck, the crustacean might and probably would return the
compliment, and demonstrate our common nature by turning my protoplasm
into living lobster." As has been said before, where there are life
manifestations there is protoplasm. Life is regarded by one class of
thinkers as the principle or cause of organization; and according to the
other, life is the product or effect of organization. We must, however,
agree with Professor Orton, who says: "Life is the effect of
organization, not the result of it. Animals do not live because they are
organized, but are organized because they are alive." In whatever way it
is looked at, life is but a forced condition. "The more advanced
thinkers, then, in science to-day," says Barker, "therefore look upon
the life of the living form as inseparable from its substance, and
believe that the former is purely phenomenal and only a manifestation of
the latter. During the existence of a special force as such, they retain
the term only to express the sum of the phenomena of living beings. The
word life must be regarded, then, as only a generalized expression
signifying the sum-total of the properties of matter possessing such
organization."

In what manner, then, does this matter, possessing the phenomena of
life, differ from inorganic matter, or in what manner does living matter
differ from matter not living? The forces which are at work on the one
side are at work on the other. The phenomena of life are all dependent
upon the working of the same physical and chemical forces as those
which are active in the rest of the world. It may be convenient to use
the terms "vitality" and "vital force" to denote the cause of certain
groups of natural operations, as we e