Page:The Harveian oration 1912.djvu/20

16 chemist in concentrating his attention on gases is apparently overlapping pure physics, which seems to have established that many media supposed to be gaseous are really clouds of solid particles of inconceivable minuteness, borne along by a velocity of which no words can convey any adequate conception. It seems, therefore, not altogether within the realm of fancy to suggest that we may all be working now in some intermediate zone, on the confines between the three kingdoms of living energy—for the colloidal states of inorganic life, the crystalloids of biology, may perhaps allow of this expression of the facts—whose language at present we do not understand, and whose purposes or meanings we are therefore unable to interpret. I wonder.

Animate or inanimate, we are never outside life. Montaigne puts it very quaintly when he says even as nature makes us to see that many dead things have yet certain secret relations to life. How like is Radium in all but death to what I would call the aureole of life. Here seems to be one substance that is always spending yet is never spent; that has power within it to re-gather of its loss, and by its action on the cell may even be said to originate the function of vitality. But does the spirit of life die? It may correlate with other forces of nature; it may, perhaps, transfer itself to other forms of being; may it be that we begin to see that it might transcend the firmament of space.