George Frederick Barker

“ Indeed, when we consider the production of electricity by osmose, and of heat and electricity both by inhibition, both capillary phenomena, the wonder is not that so much energy is evolved by the organism, but that it is so little. If the physical and chemical changes which take place within the body took place without it, there would be an abundant evolution of energy. Can we doubt that these changes are the cause of the energy exhibited by the organism? ”

“ A vital process, like the catalytic ones of the older chemistry, was found by such research to be simply a process which, for want of sufficient investigation, is not yet understood. While therefore, undoubtedly, much work yet remains to be done in the realm still called vital, the prophetic vision is already bright which will witness the last traces of inexplicable phenomena vanish and the words expressing them relegated to the limbo of the obsolete.
As a first result of recent work, the living organism has been brought absolutely within the action of the law of the Conservation of Energy. ”

“ The result, however, can not long be doubtful. "A thousand earnest seekers after truth seem to be slowly approaching a solution." And, though the ignis fatuus of life still dances over the bogs of our misty knowledge, yet its true character can not finally elude our investigation. The progress already made has hemmed it in on every side; and the province within which exclusively vital acts are now performed narrows with each year of scientific research. ”

“ Two bodies having the same properties would only be two portions of the same substance. Because life, therefore, is unlike other properties of matter, it by no means follows that it is not a property of matter. No dictum is more absolute in science than the one which predicates properties upon constitution. To say that this property exhibited by protoplasm, marvelous and even unique though it be, is not a natural result of the constitution of the matter itself, but is due to an unknown entity, a tertium quid, which inhabits and controls it, is opposed to all scientific analogy and experience. ”

“ But attraction implies action at a distance; and action at a distance implies that matter may act where it is not. This of course is impossible; and hence action at a distance, and with it attraction and potential energy, are disappearing from the language of science. But what conception is it which is taking its place? By what action does the sun hold our earth in its orbit? The answer is to be found in the properties of the ether which fills all space. The existence of this ether, the phenomena of light and electricity abundantly prove. ”

“ Neither the contractile tissue of the muscle, the axis-cylinder of the nerve, nor the secreting cell of the gland, is living, according to Beale. Hence it would be fair to draw the inference that no vital force should be required to explain the phenomena of the non-living matter of the body, such as the contraction of the muscle or the function of the nerve. If this be conceded, it is a great point gained; since the phenomenon of life becomes vastly simplified when we have to account for it only as exhibited in this one single form of living matter, protoplasm. ”

“ An animal, like a machine, only transforms its energy. Lavoisier's Guinea-pig placed in the calorimeter gave as accurate a heat-return for the energy it had absorbed in its food as any thermic engine would have done. But the parallel goes further. The mechanical work of an engine is measured by the loss of its heat and not of its substance. So the mechanical or intellectual work of a living being is measured by the amount of food rather than the amount of tissue which is burned. The energy evolved daily by the human body would raise it to a height of about six miles. ”

“ Hence it is the function of the plant to store up energy to produce the highly complex protoplasm. This, consumed by the animal as his food, continues his existence as a living being, the energy gradually set free by its successive steps of retrogressive metamorphosis appearing as the work which he performs. If this view be correct, it would follow that every individual substance found in the animal—save only those which result from degradation—must be found in the plant upon which it feeds, and this is the fact. ”

“ Such, now, are some of the facts and fancies to be found in the science of to-day concerning the phenomena of life. Physiologically considered, life has no mysterious passages, no sacred precincts into which the unhallowed foot of Science may not enter. Research has steadily diminished day by day the phenomena supposed vital. Physiology is daily assuming more and more the character of an applied science. Every action performed by the living body is sooner or later to be pronounced chemical or physical. ”

“ The work a muscle does, it does in contracting. It is to the mechanism of muscle-contraction that we are indebted for another illustration of our subject.
When work is done by a muscle in contracting, three changes are observed to take place in its tissue: First, there is a loss of its electric tension; second, there is an evolution of heat in it; and, third, carbon dioxide appears there, and its reaction, before neutral, becomes acid. ”

“ In an address of the retiring President of this Association, delivered but a few years ago, I find this sentence: "Thought can not be a physical force, because thought admits of no measure." In the light of the rapid advances lately made in investigating mental action, we see that in two directions at least, in its rate of action and of its relative energy, we may already measure thought, as we measure any other form of energy, by the effects it produces. ”

“ This conclusion is based upon the fact that while every form of energy can be completely converted into heat, heat can not be completely converted into other forms of energy, nor these into each other. ”

“ When, therefore, we thus meet together, it is fitting that, from time to time, our attention should be called to the progress which has been made along some one of the various lines of research, and to the milestones which mark the epochs of advance along the way which science has traveled. ”

“ The conception represents simply the sum of the phenomena exhibited by a living being.
Moreover, the progress which has been made in the solution of the life-question has been gained chiefly by investigation of special functions. But the functions of a vital organism are themselves vital. What, then, is the meaning of "vital" as applied to a function? Fortunately, the answer is not difficult. "Life," says Küss, the distinguished Strasburg physiologist, "is all that can not be explained by chemistry or physics." ”

“ A noteworthy parallel is disclosed in the progress of human knowledge between the ideas of life and of force. Both conceptions have advanced, though not with equal rapidity, from a stage of complete separability from matter to one of complete inseparability. ”

“ In function, the nerve-cell and the nerve-fiber are occupied solely in the reception and the transmission of energy, which is in all probability electrical. There is evidently a close analogy between the nerve and the muscle, the axis cylinder like the fibrilla being composed of cells, and having a positive electric charge upon the exterior surface, which has a tension of one tenth of a volt. ”

“ So Ranvier: "Cellular elements possess all the essential vital properties of the complete organism." And Allman, in his address as President of the British Association last year, is still more explicit. "Every living being," he says, "has protoplasm as the essential matter of every living element of its structure. . . . No one who contemplates this spontaneously moving matter can deny that it is alive. Liquid as it is, it is a living liquid; organless and structureless as it is, it manifests the essential phenomena of life. ”

“ Among the physical aspects of the mind-question, the problem of the quantitative changes which take place in the organism is a very curious and interesting one. That the energy of the brain comes from the food will be disputed by no one in these days. Hence, the brain must act like a machine and transform energy. There is, then, a purely physiological representation of mental action, concerned with forces which are known and measurable. The researches of Lombard long ago showed the concomitant heat of mental action. ”

“ Granting electric discharge to be the cause of muscle-contraction, what is its origin? That it is not carried to the muscle by the nerves follows from the fact that a muscle will still contract when deprived of all its nerve-fibers. It must therefore be generated within the muscle itself. To reach a solution of the problem we must obviously follow the analogies of its production elsewhere. ”

“ There is in living matter nothing which can be called a mechanism, nothing in which structure can be discerned. A little transparent, colorless material is the seat of these marvelous powers or-properties by which the form, structure, and function of the tissues and organs of all living things are determined. ”

“ Hence it arises that energy is being gradually dissipated as heat. Moreover, since transformation can only result when heat passes from a higher to a lower temperature, it follows that, when that perfect equilibrium of temperature is reached toward which events are tending, there can be no other energy than heat, and this absolutely inconvertible, irrecoverable. To apply this law to the present case, the muscle, for example, is a machine for transforming the energy of food into work. ”

“ The modern theory of energy, however, puts this influence in a still stronger light. As defined hitherto, energy is either motion or position; is kinetic or potential. Energy of position derives its value obviously from the fact that in virtue of attraction it may become energy of motion. ”

“ Passing now to the consideration of the general question of the transformation of energy which is effected by living beings, attention may be called to one or two points in general physics, as bearing upon its solution. The great law of the dissipation of energy, as modified by Thomson from the statement of Clausius, is thus stated: "The entropy of the universe tends to zero." In other words, the energy of the universe available for transmutation is approaching extinction. ”

“ To return to the muscle, it must now be apparent that the electrical charge which appears in its fiber may have its origin in so purely a physical cause as the contact of the heterogeneous substances of which the tissue is built up; the maintenance of this charge being effected by chemical changes going on constantly in the substance of the muscle, by which the carbon dioxide is produced, which is shown to be a measure of the work done. ”

“ Coextensive with the whole of organic nature—every vital act being referable to some mode or property of protoplasm it becomes to the biologist what the ether is to the physicist." From these quotations it would seem that even in the highest animal there is nothing living but protoplasm or germinal matter, "transparent, colorless, and, as far as can be ascertained by examination with the highest powers of the microscope, perfectly structureless. ”

“ Whenever two conductors come into contact, motion of heat results in the development of electricity, the current produced existing at the cost of heat at one part of the point of contact, and evolving heat at the other for a result. ”

“ By arresting anæsthetically the process by which carbon dioxide is absorbed and oxygen evolved, the true respiratory process, being less affected, now appears; and Schützenberger has proved that the fresh cells of the yeast-plant breathe like an aquatic animal.
It would seem, then, that the protoplasmic life of animals is identical with that of plants; a certain measure of destructive metamorphosis taking place in each, evolving energy and producing carbon dioxide and water. When, however, this function is examined quantitatively, its maximum is seen to be reached in the animal. ”

“ The animal absorbs highly complex substances as food, capable of innumerable stages of retrogressive metamorphosis before elimination. In each of these stages heat is evolved, being the energy successively stored up by the plant when it repeated these stages in the inverse order. ”

“ Bodies of such extreme complexity of constitution may well have an indefinite number of isomers. Not only does Chemistry not say that there can not be such a thing, but she encourages the expectation that there will yet be found the precise proteid of which the changes of protoplasm are properties. The rapid march of recent organic synthesis makes it quite certain that every distinct chemical substance of the living body will ultimately be produced in the laboratory ”

“ THE discovery of new truth is the grand object of scientific work. The exultation of feeling which comes from the possession of a fact, which now, for the first time, he makes known to men, must ever be the reward of the scientific worker. ”

“ As investigators and as students of science we are met here to-day at this our annual session. Each of us during the past year has been endeavoring to push outward further into the unknown, the boundary of present knowledge. ”

“ Reflection is the reflex action of the cells in their relation to the cerebral ganglia. Attention is the arrest of the transformation of energy for a moment. Ratiocination is the balancing of one energy against another. ”

“ He has only to test each separate operation which he finds going on in the organism, and to declare whether it be chemical or physical, If it be either, then, since each function is non-vital, the entire organism must be non-vital also. Hundreds of able investigators, provided with the most effective appliances of research, are now in full cry after the life-principle. Naturally, a vast amount of collateral knowledge is accumulated in the process. ”

“ Time would fail me to discuss the many other phenomena of the living body which have been found on investigation to be non-vital. Digestion, which Prout said it was impossible to believe was chemical, is now known to take place as well without the body as within it, and to result from non-vital ferments. Absorption is osmotic, and its selective power resides in the structure of the membrane and the diffusibility of the solution. Respiration is a purely chemical function. ”