The materialists give the name of "protoplasm" to that primitive structureless mass of homogeneous matter in which the lowest living organisms make their appearance. They claim that this generic substance is endowed with the property or power of producing life _de novo_, or, as Professor Bastian puts it, of "unfolding new-born specks of living matter" which subsequently undergo certain evolutional changes; but whether they die in their experimental flasks, or rise into higher and more potentially endowed forms of life, it is difficult for those following their diagnoses to determine. They further claim that the same law of vital manifestation obtains in organic solutions as in the structureless mass they call "protoplasm." Both are essentially endowed with the same potentiality of originating life independently of vital units, or _de novo_, as they more persistently phrase it. But why speak of _unfolding_ "new-born specks of living matter?" "To unfold" means to open the folds of something--to turn them back, get at the processes of their _infoldment_. It implies a pre-existing something, inwrapped as a germ in its environment. If not a germ, what is this pre-existing vital something which their language implies? Is our scientific technology so destitute of definitional accuracy that they cannot use half a dozen scientific terms without committing half that number of down-right scientific blunders? "New-born specks of living matter" is language that a vitalist might possibly use by sheer inadvertence; but no avowed materialist, like Professor Bastian, should trip in this definitional way. "Living matter," _born_ of what? Certainly not of _dead_ matter. Death quickens nothing into life, not even the autonomous moulds of the grave. It implies the absence of all vitality--a state or condition of matter in which all vital functions have been suspended, have utterly ceased, if, indeed, they ever existed. It behooves the materialists to use language with more precision and accuracy than this. "Dead matter," whatever the phrase may imply, can bear nothing, produce nothing, quicken nothing. The pangs of death once past, the pangs of life cease. Nor is there any birth from unquickened matter. Animals _bear_ young, trees _bear_ fruit, but force _produces_ results. What then quickens protoplasmic matter? Neither vital force, nor vegetative force, if we are to credit the materialists. They would scorn to postulate such a theory, or accept any such absurd remnant of the old vitalistic school. It is rather "molecular force"--a physical, not a vital unit--that gives us these "new-born specks of living matter." [26] This is what they would all assert at once, in their enthusiasm to enlighten us on a new terminology.