Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 17.djvu/781

Rh Another point of interest has reference to the modern views of capillarity. In 1838 J. W. Draper showed that capillarity is an electrical phenomenon. Quite recently, Lippmann has developed and extended this view and fully confirmed it. Whenever the free surface of a liquid, curved by capillary action, is electrified it changes its form; and conversely, when such a surface is made by mechanical means to change its form, an electromotive force is developed. Based upon this principle Lippmann constructed a capillary reversible engine and an extremely sensitive capillary electrometer. The former, when a current of electricity was applied to it, developed mechanical work and ran as a motor. When turned by hand, it became an electromotor. In the animal organism there are it is true but a few free surfaces where this action can take place. But Gore has shown that the same phenomenon appears between two liquids in contact, their boundary being altered in character by electrification. 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?

Thus far, when we have spoken of a living being, we have had reference to the organism as a whole, and this of a rather complex kind. In this view of the case, however, we find that biological microscopists do not agree with us. "The cell alone," says Küss, "is the essentially vital element." Says Beale: "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." And again, "However much organisms and their tissues in their fully formed state may vary as regards the character, properties, and composition of the formed material, all were first in the condition of clear, transparent, structureless, formless living matter." 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. . . . 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