inasmuch as it is an attempt to make a halt where no halt can be
made. This is enough; but, furthermore, the fact that the
protoplasmic parts of the body are MORE living than the non-
protoplasmic--which I cannot deny, without denying that it is any
longer convenient to think of life and death at all--will answer my
purpose to the full as well or better.

I pointed out another consequence, which, again, was cruelly the
reverse of what the promoters of the protoplasm movement might be
supposed anxious to arrive at--in a series of articles which
appeared in the Examiner during the summer of 1879, and showed that
if protoplasm were held to be the sole seat of life, then this unity
in the substance vivifying all, both animals and plants, must be
held as uniting them into a single corporation or body--especially
when their community of descent is borne in mind--more effectually
than any merely superficial separation into individuals can be held
to disunite them, and that thus protoplasm must be seen as the life
of the world--as a vast body corporate, never dying till the earth
itself shall pass away. This came practically to saying that
protoplasm was God Almighty, who, of all the forms open to Him, had
chosen this singularly unattractive one as the channel through which
to make Himself manifest in the flesh by taking our nature upon Him,
and animating us with His own Spirit. Our biologists, in fact, were
fast nearing the conception of a God who was both personal and
material, but who could not be made to square with pantheistic
notions inasmuch as no provision was made for the inorganic world;
and, indeed, they seem to have become alarmed at the grotesqueness
of the position in which they must ere long have found themselves,
for in the autumn of 1879 the boom collapsed, and thenceforth the
leading reviews and magazines have known protoplasm no more. About