72. The analytical view may separate certain parts as active, and other parts as passive, and thus regard the cells as the seats of vital activity, the intercellular substance as merely accessory and instrumental; but the real or synthetical view must recognize both parts as equally indispensable, equally vital. Take cartilage, for instance, with its enormous preponderance of intercellular substance (formed material), and consider how absolutely impossible any of its uses would be were it reduced to the germinal matter of its corpuscles! And so of all the tissues. 73. If formed material is not to be excluded from the living parts of the organism, neither is the plasmode, out of which the germinal matter arises, since here we have the nutritive changes in their highest activity; and because the property of Nutrition is here most active, the other property of Development is in abeyance. Dr. Beale holds that pabulum necessarily becomes germinal matter; but when we come to treat of Nutrition it will appear that this is not more true than that Food necessarily becomes Tissue: some of it does; but much of it is used up for heat and other purposes. 74. What is true and important in the distinction between germinal matter and formed material is, that from the former onwards there is a gradual process of devitalization, the older parts of every organite and tissue approaching more and more to the state of inorganic matter. But to show how vain is the attempt to restrict Vitality to any one out of a complex of co-operant factors, we might set up a chemical hypothesis to the effect that Vitality depends on phosphates, and with it explain the phenomena quite as well as with the hypothesis of germinal matter. For not only is it found that the productive quality of a soil depends on its richness in phosphates, but, as Lehmann has shown, wherever cells and fibres make their appearance phosphates are found, even in the lowest organisms, which, however, contain but little. Phosphates abound in seeds and ova, in muscles and ganglia, and are deficient in the woody parts of plants and the elastic fibres of animals. The infant absorbs phosphates in large quantities and excretes them in small quantities. Nervous activity is accompanied by the consumption of a third more phosphorus than accompanies muscular activity. Phosphates are among the most energetic of organic stimulants. But who would endow the phosphates with Vitality, on the ground of their indispensable presence in all vital processes?