lures have been lamentable, that the doctrine is utterly
discredited. But my position here is so well known that I need not
dwell upon it further.

With one special utterance of Professor Virchow his translator
connects me by name. 'I have no objection,' observes the Professor,
'to your saying that atoms of carbon also possess mind, or that in
their connection with the Plastidule company they acquire mind; only I
do not know how I am to perceive this.' This is substantially what I
had said seventeen years previously in the 'Saturday Review.' The
Professor continues: 'If I explain attraction and repulsion as
exhibitions of mind, as psychical phenomena, I simply throw the Psyche
out of the window, and the Psyche ceases to be a Psyche.' I may say,
in passing, that the Psyche that could be cast out of the window is
not worth houseroom. At this point the translator, who is evidently a
man of culture, strikes in with a foot-note. 'As an illustration of
Professor Virchow's meaning, we may quote the conclusion at which
Doctor Tyndall arrives respecting the hypothesis of a human soul,
offered as an explanation or a simplification of a series of obscure
phenomena--psychical phenomena, as he calls them. "If you are
content to make your soul a poetic rendering of a phenomenon which
refuses the yoke of ordinary physical laws, I, for one, would not
object to this exercise of ideality."' [Footnote: 'Presidential
Address delivered before the Birmingham and Midland Institute, October
1, 1877. Fortnightly Review,' Nov. 1, 1877, p. 60] Professor
Virchow's meaning, I admit, required illustration; but I do not
clearly see how the quotation from me subserves this purpose. I do
not even know whether I am cited as meriting praise or deserving
opprobrium. In a far coarser fashion this utterance of mine has been
dealt with in other places: it may therefore be worth while to spend a
few words upon it.

The sting of a wasp at the finger-end announces itself to the brain as
pain. The impression made by the sting travels, in the first place,
with comparative slowness along the nerves affected; and only when it
reaches the brain have we the fact of consciousness. Those who think
most profoundly on this subject hold that a chemical change, which,
strictly interpreted, is atomic motion, is, in such a case, propagated
along the nerve, and communicated to the brain. Again, on feeling the
sting I flap the insect violently away. What has cau