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 working of physical forces in physiological processes. Wherever
rigid experiment carries us, we are safe in following this lead; but
the moment we begin to theorize beyond our strict observation, we are in
danger of falling into those mechanical follies which true science has
long outgrown.

Recognizing the fact, then, that we have learned nothing but the
machinery of life, and are no nearer to its essence, what is it that we
have gained by this great discovery of the cell formation and function?

It would have been reward enough to learn the method Nature pursues
for its own sake. If the sovereign Artificer lets us into his own
laboratories and workshops, we need not ask more than the privilege
of looking on at his work. We do not know where we now stand in the
hierarchy of created intelligences. We were made a little lower than the
angels. I speak it not irreverently; as the lower animals surpass man
in some of their attributes, so it may be that not every angel's eye
can see as broadly and as deeply into the material works of God as
man himself, looking at the firmament through an equatorial of fifteen
inches' aperture, and searching into the tissues with a twelfth of an
inch objective.

But there are other positive gains of a more practical character. Thus
we are no longer permitted to place the seat of the living actions in
the extreme vessels, which are only the carriers from which each part
takes what it wants by the divine right of the omnipotent nucleated
cell. The organism has become, in the words already borrowed from
Virchow, "a sum of vital unities." The strictum and laxum, the increased
and diminished action of the vessels, out of which medical theories