Legend
The British Association
Sheffield, Friday.
The 1879 proceedings of the British Association for the Advancement of Science came to a close here last night. As Captain Douglas Galton, one of the secretaries, remarked, the British Association is like a chrysalis for fifty-one weeks of the year, and develops into a large and complex organism during the remaining week.
The President, Dr. G. J. Allman, in his opening address, made several remarks of an antagonistic nature to the theory of materialism; he also made known some curious facts in relation to the lowest forms of animal and vegetable life. He stated that in no ease had an instance been known of dead matter spontaneously generating into a living organism, but evidence proved that all living things came from previously living organisms. He said:—
“From the facts which have been now brought to your notice there is but one legitimate conclusion— that life is a property of protoplasm. In this assertion there is nothing that need startle us. The essential phenomena of living beings are not so widely separated from the phenomena of lifeless matter as to render it impossible to recognise an analogy between them: for even irritability, the one grand character of all living beings, is not more; difficult to be conceived of as a property of matter than the physical phenomena of radial energy.
“It is quite true that between lifeless and living matter there is a vast difference—a difference greater far than any which can be found between the most diverse manifestations of lifeless matter. Though the refined synthesis of modern chemistry may have succeeded in forming a few principles which until lately had been deemed the proper product of vitality, the fact still remains that no one has ever yet built up one particle of living matter out of lifeless elements—that every living creature, from the simplest dweller on the confines of organisation up to the highest and most complex organism, has its origin in pre-existent living matter—that the protoplasm of to-day is but the continuation of the protoplasm of other ages, handed down to us through periods of indefinable and indeterminable time.
“Yet with all this, vast as the differences may be, there is nothing which precludes a comparison of the properties of living matter with those of lifeless.
“When, however, we say that life is a property of protoplasm, we assert as much as we are justified in doing. Here we stand upon the boundary between life in its proper conception, as a group of phenomena having irritability as their common bond, and that other and higher group of phe-<... continues on page 10-22 >
Editor's notes
Sources
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London Spiritualist, No. 367, September 5, 1879, pp. 109-14