other those which are the by-products of nutrition, and which are in the process of elimination, there remain the protein or albuminous substances, and these must be considered, if not the essential factor of life, at least the theater of its manifestations.... Chemistry, however, is totally ignorant, or nearly so, of the constitution of living albumen, for chemical methods of investigation at the very outset kill the living cell. The slightest rise in temperature, contact with the solvent, the very powerful effect of even the mildest reactions cause the transformation that needs to be prevented, and the chemist has nothing left but dead albumen.” (Smithson. Inst. Rpt. for 1916, pp. 208, 209.) Chemical analysis associated with physical analysis by means of the polariscope, spectroscope, x-rays, ultramicroscope, etc. is extremely useful in determining the structure of inorganic units like the atom and the molecule. Both, too, throw valuable light on the problem of the structure of non-living multimolecules such as the crystal units of crystalloids and the ultramicrons of colloids, but they furnish no clue to the submicroscopical morphology of the living cell. Such methods do not enable us to examine anything more than the “physical substrate” of life, and that, only after it has been radically altered; for it is not the same after life has flown. At all events, the integrating principle, the formative determinant, which binds the components of living protoplasm into a unitary system, which makes of them a single totality instead of a mere sum or fortuitous aggregate of disparate and uncoördinated factors, and which gives to them a determinate and persistent specificity that can hold its own amid a perpetual fluxion of matter and continual flow of energy, this is forever inaccessible to the chemist, and constitutes a phenomenon of which the inorganic world affords no parallel.