It may not perhaps be immediately apparent why the admission that a piece of healthy living brain is more living than the end of a finger-nail, is so dangerous to common sense ways of looking at life and death; I had better, therefore, be more explicit. By this admission degrees of livingness are admitted within the body; this involves approaches to non-livingness. On this the question arises, “Which are the most living parts?” The answer to this was given a few years ago with a flourish of trumpets, and our biologists shouted with one voice, “Great is protoplasm. There is no life but protoplasm, and Huxley is its prophet.” Read Huxley’s “Physical Basis of Mind.” Read Professor Mivart’s article, “What are Living Beings?” in the _Contemporary Review_, July, 1879. Read Dr. Andrew Wilson’s article in the _Gentleman’s Magazine_, October, 1879. Remember Professor Allman’s address to the British Association, 1879; ask, again, any medical man what is the most approved scientific attitude as regards the protoplasmic and non-protoplasmic parts of the body, and he will say that the thinly veiled conclusion arrived at by all of them is, that the protoplasmic parts are alone truly living, and that the non-protoplasmic are non-living. It may suffice if I confine myself to Professor Allman’s address to the British Association in 1879, as a representative utterance. Professor Allman said:— “Protoplasm lies at the base of every vital phenomenon. It is, as Huxley has well expressed it, ‘the physical basis of life;’ wherever there is life from its lowest to its highest manifestation there is protoplasm; wherever there is protoplasm there is life.” {122a} To say wherever there is life there is protoplasm, is to say that there can be no life without protoplasm, and this is saying that where there is no protoplasm there is no life. But large parts of the body are non-protoplasmic; a bone is, indeed, permeated by protoplasm, but it is not protoplasm; it follows, therefore, that according to Professor Allman bone is not in any proper sense of words a living substance. From this it should follow, and doubtless does follow in Professor Allman’s mind, that large tracts of the human body, if not the greater part by weight (as bones, skin, muscular tissues, &c.), are no more alive than a coat or pair of boots in wear is alive, except in so far as the bones, &c., are more closely and nakedly permeated by protoplasm than the coat or boots, and are thus brought into closer, directer, and more permanent communication with that which, if not life itself, still has more of the ear of life, and comes nearer to its royal person than anything else does. Indeed that this is Professor Allman’s opinion appears from the passage on page 26 of the report, in which he says that in “protoplasm we find the only form of matter in which life can manifest itself.”