Page:The Harveian oration 1903.djvu/60

THE HARVEIAN ORATION, 1903 >> projected. The substance left is also radio- active, and successive residues, differing as they do from each other, yet continue to exhibit radio-activity, "and one of the residues so left seems ultimately to pitch away electrons simply instead of atoms of matter '-a veritable trans- mutation of matter. Thus it is supposed that "the massive and extremely complex atoms of a radio-active substance are liable to get into an unstable condition. . . and gradually dis- integrating fall into other and ultimately more stable forms of matter." Yet it appears that as the radio-active substance thus breaks up, fresh radio-active matter is as constantly regenerated, possibly, as Lord Kelvin has suggested, from the ethereal waves surrounding the atoms.

Even as the atomic and molecular theory was laid hold of to furnish an explanation of that flux of chemical activity which we denominate bioplasm, so have these further speculations on ionic action been pressed into the same service, and with some promise, wholly hypothetical as they may be. It is to Professor Loeb, of Chicago, that we in the main owe the application of the ionic theory to physiological phenomena. "The bulk of protoplasm," he writes, consists of colloidal material, and the physical manifestations of life, such as muscular contraction, protoplasmic

1 American Journal of Physiology, 1901-2. 54