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These are the larval forms of the parasite and have been called by Le Dantec the micro-filaria. If blood of the patient drawn from the skin, is examined during the day few if any of these parasites are found, but if it is examined between five or six o'clock in the evening and eight or nine o'clock the next morning they may be found in numbers.
Professor Loeb, with his "Mechanistic Conception of Life"; Professor Henderson, of Harvard, with his "Fitness of the Environment"; Professor Le Dantec, of the Sorbonne in Paris, with his volume on "The Nature and Origin of Life," published a few years since; Professor Schäfer, President of the British Association, Professor Verworn of Bonn, and many others find in the laws and properties of matter itself a sufficient explanation of all the phenomena of life.
To Le Dantec, the difference between the quick and the dead is of the same order as the difference which exists between two chemical compounds for example, as that which exists between alcohol and an aldehyde, a liquid that has two less atoms of hydrogen in its composition.
The water in the wave, and the laws that govern it, do not differ at all from the water and its laws that surround it; but unless one takes into account the force that makes the wave, an analysis of the phenomena will leave one where he began. Professor Le Dantec leaves the subject where he took it up, with the origin of life and the life processes unaccounted for.
At last the train stopped at Quiberon. They stopped at the Hotel de France to speak to the Proprietress, Mme. Le Dantec, and get a picnic dinner from her to take with them. The boat, the Soulacroup, was filling the air with its second whistle, so they had to hurry along. The tide was not yet full, so they had to climb down the slimy quay, slippery with trodden seaweed, shiny with fish scales.
Yet chemical reactions in the laboratory cannot produce life. With Le Dantec, biology, like geology and astronomy, is only applied mechanics and chemistry. Such is the result of the rigidly objective study of life the only method analytical science can pursue.
When we call an organism a living machine we at once take it out of the categories of the merely mechanical and automatic and lift it into a higher order the vital order. Professor Le Dantec says we are mechanisms in the third degree, a mechanism of a mechanism of a mechanism.
The conception of vitality as a factor in itself answers to nothing that the objective study of life can disclose; such a study reveals a closed circle of physical forces, chemical and mechanical, into which no immaterial force or principle can find entrance. "The fact of being conscious," Le Dantec says with emphasis, "does not intervene in the slightest degree in directing vital movements."
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