There has been no hesitation in using the term “memory” concurrently with that of hysteresis to designate the behaviour of bodies acted on by magnetism or by certain mechanical forces. It is true that M. H. Bouasse protests in the name of the physico-mathematicians against the employment of these figurative expressions. But has he not himself written “a twisted wire is a wound-up watch,” and elsewhere, “the properties of bodies depend at every moment upon all anterior modifications”? Does not this imply that they retain in some manner the impression of their past evolution? Powerful deformative agencies leave a trace of their action; they modify the body’s condition of molecular aggregation, and some physicists go so far as to say that they even modify its chemical constitution. With the exception of M. Duhem, the disciples of the mechanical school who have studied elasticity admit that the effect of an external force upon a body depends upon the forces which have been previously acting on it, and not merely upon those which are acting on it at the present moment. Its present state cannot be anticipated, it is the recapitulation of preceding states. The effect of a torsional force upon a new wire will be different from that of the same force upon a wire previously subjected to torsions and detorsions. It was with reference to actions of this kind that Boltzmann, in 1876, declared that “a wire that has been twisted or drawn out remembers for a certain time the deformations which it has undergone.” This memory is obliterated and disappears after a certain definite period. Here then, in a problem of static equilibrium, we find introduced an unexpected factor—time. To sum up, it is the physicists themselves who have indicated the correspondence between the condition of existence in many brute bodies and that in many living bodies. It cannot be expected that these analogies will in any way serve as explanations. We should rather seek to derive the vital from the physical phenomenon. This is the sole ambition of the physiologist. To derive the physical from the vital phenomenon would be unreasonable. We do not attempt to do this here. It is nevertheless true that analogies are of service, were it only to shake the support which, from the time of Aristotle, has been accorded to the division of the bodies of nature into _psuchia_ and _apsuchia_—_i.e._, into living and brute bodies. § 2. THE BROWNIAN MOVEMENT.