On life and on vital action in health and disease : being the Lumleian lectures delivered before the Royal College of Physicians / by Lionel S. Beale.

Date:
1875
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On life and on vital action in health and disease : being the Lumleian lectures delivered before the Royal College of Physicians / by Lionel S. Beale. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    differ from a fragment of albumen by their granular cha- racter, but the statement is not correct. In the first place a granular appearance is not characteristic of living matter. If granules are discerned in it, they are not essential, and are at least as likely to be lifeless as they are to be living parti- cles. Living matter is, in fact, as free from granules as a fragment of the purest albumen. Secondly, the differences between any fragment of albumen and any living particle are enormous—but of a kind quite distinct from that sug- gested in the above statement. If a portion of pure bioplasm be carefully examined with the highest powers at our command, and under the most favourable circumstances as to illumination, it will be found to be entirely devoid of gi'anular character. Clear, trans- parent and colourless, there will not be discernible in any part of it the faintest indication of structure. Nay, if motionless, its presence can only be recognised by the fact of it being a very little less perfectly transparent than the fluid which surrounds it, and by its refracting property being slightly different from that of the medium in which it lives. The susrsestion so often made that the relation between living and non-living matter is a close one, is as entirely groundless as the further suggestion that before very long the exact nature of the relation between the two will be cleared up, and the chasm between the living and the non- living bridged over. Neither is there anything to justify the statements made for the purpose of inducing people to believe that the non-living passes into the living by insensi- ble gradations of some kind. There are many characters in which the living differs absolutely from any form of non- living matter yet discovered. One broad essential character