same in the living as in the dead cell. Some chemists, thinking that atomic oscillations will account for everything, have hooted at the idea of any peculiarity in vital action. They would make out that things grow merely by the joint action of the correlated molecular motions under favoring conditions; but there is just the same heat, light, electricity, moisture, and oxygen working on the dead as on the living. Life itself is the chief condition. There is something which transforms light and heat into the right kind of chemical force or motion. Cells grow no doubt by chemical action, but what limits their growth, what makes them divide and thus multiply? What makes one cell produce another unlike itself? Whence come the partitioning of functions and the assignment of these functions to particular cells? Why do cells. extend in certain directions, as if according to a predetermined plan? Why is the leaf of the oak sinuated and the leaf of the willow entire? Why does the stem grow week after week and produce nothing but ordinary leaves and branches, and then, as if at an appointed time, concentrate all its forces to form the floral whorls? Why does the matured seed show no sign of life till spring, though you plant it, water it, and warm it in early winter? Is the little protoplasmic mass of a primal germ cell in possession of free will and foreknowledge absolute? Oh, no! its immense possibilities and potencies are said to come from heredity. Is heredity a compacted molecular force? There must be something besides matter and motion, something which gives direction and directs according to a plan foreordained. The director is life. Life is not a force, but it controls and directs the forces. Whence comes the plan by which it works? There is a point of progress in thought, at which "tendency to variation," "struggle for existence," "natural selection" become empty words.

But with the essence, the ontology of the hyperphysical and metaphysical chemistry is not concerned. With the sensible phenomena of life, however, chemists have much to do. Suppose we need acetic acid. We plant seeds that have life. We make sure that the soil shall contain what vigorous life calls for. The living germs run their course and give being to other seeds, "some forty, some sixty, and some an hundred fold." We induce the new germs to sprout a little and they transform the starch into glucose. We call in the aid of other living cells to break up the glucose

and give alcohol. And, finally, still another living thing constrains the alcohol to oxidize and furnish the desired product. Again we boast much of the synthesis of a valuable organic dyestuff, as though life had nothing to do with it. But when we trace all the steps and sum up, it comes to "these are the spores that formed the ferns that made the coal that produced the tar that yielded the anthracene that gave the bibromanthraquinone that turned into the alizarine that Graebe and Liebermann built." Let us not be too proud of our power of dispensing with life. Furthermore, let us not be too proud of our power to reason out and then build up organic compounds. Graebe and Liebermann's was surely a grand discovery with which accident had nothing to do. Was it indeed? We now know that alizarine has at last seven isomers, and therefore it was by a rare stroke of good luck that the German chemists hit upon the one chance in eight of getting. what they were seeking for.

Physiological or biological chemistry is yet in its infancy and but comparatively few tenderly and assiduously care for it. It has much to do with indefinite, unstable, evasive colloids, and most chemists prefer to take easier subjects and study the definite and crystallizable. The interest in biological study is, however, increasing, and there is much patient work done and progress made in the chemical part of the subject. The field is large and there is room for many courageous, persevering laborers. Proximate organic analysis still remains undeveloped. The world does not comprehend the light that we already have. Thus the books still call the ultraviolet of the spectrum "the chemical rays," though Draper, thirty years ago, showed that it is yellow light which is most efficient in reducing carbonic acid with the help of chlorophyll. Surely the assimilation of carbon in all the forests and prairies and cultivated fields is of more importance than the reduction of silver salts in a few photographic studios.

In fermentation, putrefaction, nitrification, and in zymotic diseases vegetative life may intervene, but how much do we yet know as to what is cause and what is merely concomitant? When the Merulius lacrymans makes its troublesome ravages, does its mycelium ramify infinitely into and around the wood cells and devour their strength with some corrosive secretion or some oxidizing exhalation? Or does it merely afford just the right supply of moisture

to favor atmospheric oxidation? One of our laboratories here has lately furnished most excellent specimens of this unwelcome intruder, which appear to countenance this latter view. Certainly the hydraulic arrangements of the fungus are well calculated to distribute more water than is needed for its own growth and yet allow a free access of air to the dampened support.

It is possible that biologists at present tend towards extremes in referring so many things as they do to the presence of fungi, which may be the consequence rather than the cause of certain conditions. We should always remember that a problem is far from being solved when we have simply worked out the value of y in terms of the still unknown, and perhaps unknowable x.

It may be pertinent to inquire whether chemistry tends, as many assume that ail physical science now tends, to materialism. I believe no true science tends that way: it is rather the lack of really liberal cultivation that causes such dimness of vision. Surely materialism is no more prevalent now than it was among the ancient Athenians, who had no physical science. We hear much said of the learning and culture of that polished people,-and some of their modern imitators; just as though æsthetics were the only science, and floriculture the only culture!

Doubtless heredity influences personal belief, and the blood of those seventeenth century colonizers still flows in human veins; blood that is thicker than vapid, all attenuating water. But there is much in the training of the chemist to foster a wholesome skepticism and a just intolerance; intolerance of human pride and human dicta; skepticism of the airy theories of pseudo-science. We would by all means welcome free thought; but let it not be the reproduction of other men's opinions; let it not be mere ciphering with algebraic symbols; let it not be ridicule and confident assertion, the glittering weapons of fools; let it be thought and not the spurious semblance of thought. There is a higher standard than ranting declaimers go by. «Η αλήθεια ἐλευθέρωσε Spas." "Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free."

In chemical practice, the constant appeal to sensible tests and to the precision of the balance checks reliance on hasty assumptions. The stern rule that the sum of the parts must equal the whole, that percentages must count up one hundred, is rigidly en

forced and the discipline is severe but strengthening. The chemist soon learns that exact truthfulness in others and rigid honesty in himself lie at the very foundation of science and real knowledge, and he cannot help looking on laxity in experiment or statement as the unpardonable sin.

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Again, the history of chemistry gives little encouragement to conservatism, for perhaps no other subject is so well calculated to impress one with the idea that theories are but the changeable dress of science. Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment." The phlogistic, dualistic, caloric, electrochemical, atomic, nucleus, radical, mechanical, catalytic, and biological theories have all had their uses for a time, they have all aided the progress of science, but in the chemistry of to-day we find only well trimmed shreds of most of them. The review of the enthusiastic but unstable past shows how often men have remained satisfied with explanations which were not reasons. We all wonder what will have become of the atomic theory itself, when the centennial of its promulgation comes round, twenty-seven years hence.

But when we rise above the reactions of brute matter and the play of insensate forces, and are insensibly led on to look into vegetative life, irritability, sensation, perception, thought, the transmission of thought, the self-analysis of thought, and the prime origin of thought, all theories, actual or possible, fail to satisfy. It requires something more than lenses and chemical changes of the retina to see. A noise may ring the tympanum and not be heard. We cannot trace the connection between phosphorus and sparkling wit. Physical science can explain only the tools of thought and cannot explain all there is of them. There is no peculiarity in the matter of the printed page. Its supposed atomic motions give no clew to its marvellous power. As we turn the leaves of the oldest scripture in existence, to the eye alone there is only paper and carbon; yet the alphabetic symbols convey something which is not of them, but beneath, beyond, and above them. Through them we see a grand mirror of human trial. To the ear there is no sound, yet this æonian telephone brings down to us the voice of Zophar the Naamathite uttering the interrogative negation, "Canst thou by searching find out God?" and we hear the yearning cry of Job, "O that I knew where I might find him." Then by "the true Light which lighteth every

man that cometh into the world," we perceive that the revelation of Him as something more than the vague mainspring of creation, as a personal being who still lives and cares for every one of us, comes not by induction, not by syllogistic reasoning, not by algebraic analysis, not by synthetic philosophy, not in acts of terror, not in works of power. It comes in the still, small voice which he who will may hear.