escientific age, but which he calls
"biotic energy."

Biotic energy is peculiar to living bodies, and "there are precisely the
same criteria for its existence," says Professor Moore, "as for the
existence of any one of the inorganic energy types, viz., a set of
discrete phenomena; and its nature is as mysterious to us as the cause
of any one of these inorganic forms about which also we know so little.
It is biotic energy which guides the development of the ovum, which
regulates the exchanges of the cell, and causes such phenomena as nerve
impulse, muscular contraction, and gland secretion, and it is a form of
energy which arises in colloidal structures, just as magnetism appears
in iron, or radio-activity in uranium or radium, and in its
manifestations it undergoes exchanges with other forms of energy, in the
same manner as these do among one another."

Like Professor Henderson, Professor Moore concedes to the vitalists
about all they claim--namely, that there is some form of force or
manifestation of energy peculiar to living bodies, and one that cannot
be adequately described in terms of physics and chemistry. Professor
Moore says this biotic energy "arises in colloidal structures," and so
far as biochemistry can make out, arises _spontaneously_ and gives rise
to that marvelous bit of mechanism, the cell. In the cell appears "a
form of energy unknown outside life processes which leads the mazy dance
of life from point to point, each new development furnishing a starting
point for the next one." It not only leads the dance along our own line
of descent from our remote ancestors--it leads the dance along the long
road of evolution from the first unicellular form in the dim palaeozoic
seas to the complex and highly specialized forms of our own day.

The secret of this life force, or biotic energy, according to Professor
Moore, is in the keeping of matter itself. The steps or stages from the
depths of matter by which life arose, lead up from that imaginary
something, the electron, to the inorganic colloids, or to the
crystallo-colloids, which are the threshold of life, each stage showing
some new transformation of energy. There must be an all-potent energy
transformation before we can get chemical energy out of physical energy,
and then biotic energy out of chemical energy. This transformation of
inorganic energy into life energy cannot be traced or repeated in the
laboratory, yet science believes the secret will someti