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If they insist upon the presence of a chemical unit, or, worse still, a crystalline "germ" or unit, in the case of statical aggregations, they are effectually estopped from denying the presence of vital units in dynamical aggregations.

From such experiments, and also from general observations and knowledge, it seems manifest that the lines of magnetic force can traverse pure space, just as gravitating force does, and as statical electrical forces do, and therefore space has a magnetic relation of its own, and one that we shall probably find hereafter to be of the utmost importance in natural phenomena.

Naturally, therefore, biologists enamored of clean-cut concepts have regarded the distinction between the two kingdoms as artificial. They would be right, if definition in this case must be made, as in the mathematical and physical sciences, according to certain statical attributes which belong to the object defined and are not found in any other.

These physicists make even the slightest change in developmental phases whether statical, as in the case of crystals, or dynamical, as in the case of living organisms to depend on physical conditions, those aiding and abetting what they call the "molecular play of physical forces."

It is true that we have here a series of dynamical phenomena, while the illustrations I have given of stable and unstable equilibrium relate only to statical problems; but we can have dynamical stability and dynamical instability, just as we can have stable and unstable equilibrium. Dynamical instability corresponds with the maximum of energy, and dynamical stability to the minimum of energy.

If vital units have only a hypothetical existence, then chemical units, statical units, and morphological units, should fall into the same categories of judgment. A great deal of needless ingenuity has been wasted, both by the vitalists and materialists, in formulating impossible definitions of life in attempts to tell us what life is. But Mr.

Nor did the ancients know anything of the doctrine of averages or of crucial instances, both of which methods have proved of such importance in modern criticism, the one adding a most important proof of the statical elements of history, and exemplifying the influences of all physical surroundings on the life of man; the other, as in the single instance of the Moulin Quignon skull, serving to create a whole new science of prehistoric archaeology and to bring us back to a time when man was coeval with the stone age, the mammoth and the woolly rhinoceros.

There is no method in him and none elsewhere in Roman literature. Nations may not have missions but they certainly have functions. And the function of ancient Italy was not merely to give us what is statical in our institutions and rational in our law, but to blend into one elemental creed the spiritual aspirations of Aryan and of Semite.

Poised for a moment at the summit, the cannon-ball may then be likened to the clock-weight, for the entire energy which it possessed by its motion has been transformed into the statical energy of a raised weight. Thus we see these two forms of energy are mutually interchangeable.

Whenever a dynamic law, or a statical, is found to be uniformly operative under a given set of conditions, we had supposed the operation not to be above the powers of nature, but in entire accord with them, and hence not supernatural.