Any one who reads Professor Allman's address above referred to with
due care will see that he was uneasy about protoplasm, even at the
time of its greatest popularity. Professor Allman never says
outright that the non-protoplasmic parts of the body are no more
alive than chairs and tables are. He said what involved this as an
inevitable consequence, and there can be no doubt that this is what
he wanted to convey, but he never insisted on it with the
outspokenness and emphasis with which so startling a paradox should
alone be offered us for acceptance; nor is it easy to believe that
his reluctance to express his conclusion totidem verbis was not due
to a sense that it might ere long prove more convenient not to have
done so. When I advocated the theory of the livingness, or quasi-
livingness of machines, in the chapters of "Erewhon" of which all
else that I have written on biological subjects is a development, I
took care that people should see the position in its extreme form;
the non-livingness of bodily organs is to the full as startling a
paradox as the livingness of non-bodily ones, and we have a right to
expect the fullest explicitness from those who advance it. Of
course it must be borne in mind that a machine can only claim any
appreciable even aroma of livingness so long as it is in actual use.
In "Erewhon" I did not think it necessary to insist on this, and did
not, indeed, yet fully know what I was driving at.

The same disposition to avoid committing themselves to the assertion
that any part of the body is non-living may be observed in the
writings of the other authorities upon protoplasm above referred to;
I have searched all they said, and cannot find a single passage in
which they declare even the osseous parts of a bone to be non-
living, though this conclusion was the raison d'etre of all they