A very fresh and lucid presentation of the whole case is given by Borodin, Professor of Botany in St. Petersburg, in his essay, “Protoplasm and Vital Force.”(92) He sharply castigates the one-sidedness and impetuosity of the mechanical theory, as in Haeckel’s discovery of Bathybius and of non-nucleated bacteria. The latter are problematical, and the former has been proved an illusion. To penetrate farther into the processes of life is simply to become aware of an ever-deepening series of riddles. There is no such thing as “protoplasm,” or “living proteid,” or indeed any unified, simple “living matter” whatever. Artificial “oil-emulsion amoebæ”(93) bear the same relation to living ones that Vaucanson’s mechanical duck bears to a real one; that is, none at all. Our “protoplasm” is as mystical as the old “vital force,” and both are only camping-grounds for our ignorance. Neither the mechanical nor the atomic theory were the results of exact investigations; they were borrowed from philosophy. We do indeed investigate the typically vital process of irritability by physical methods. But the response made by the organism to physical coercion may be called a mockery of physics. The mechanists help themselves out with crude analogies from the mechanical, conceal the problem with the name “irritability,” and thus get rid of the greatest marvels. If vital force itself were to call out from its cells, “Here I am,” they would probably see in it only a remarkable case of “irritability.” Mechanism is no more positive knowledge than vitalism is; it is only the dogmatic faith of the majority of present-day naturalists. Constructive Criticism.