He has arrived at this conclusion after many years of intricate and difficult experiments along the line of reproduction of animals, of determining the effect of salt on the heart-beat and its rythmic motion, and on other muscles, and of the destructive processes at work in the eggs of simple unicellar animals. They have been the means of determining the answer to the one great question, "What is life?" and he regards all his previous discoveries subsidiary to this one. He received his first hint of this new theory of life through the fact that electricity is able to affect protoplasm in a more universal and effective way than any other form of stimulus. And he drew the inference that if electricity is able to affect protoplasm in the form of currents, it ought to do so in the form of ions, which is an electrically charged atom or group of atoms. In experimenting to determine the toxic and antitoxic of ions on protoplasm, which is the basic substance of all physical life, he discovered that any one salt will act as a poison on the eggs of a sea urchin, but by adding one or more, or certain other salts, he found it was able to counteract the effects of this toxic effect. From which he concluded that the toxic and antitoxic effect of the salts were due to the manner in which its atoms are electrically charged. He found that when a salt whose atoms are positively charged come in contact with the eggs of the sea urchin, they interfered with the life processes, while salts whose atoms were negatively charged stimulate contraction; and the presence of both positively and negatively charged atoms were necessary, and the phenomena of life is due to the play between the different charges of electricity in the molecules. The energy of foodstuffs and motions of the heart and other muscles of the body are not due to the production of heat, but to the chemical energy in electrically charged molecules. He says: "A part of the chemical energy of foodstuffs is transformed into electric energy, which gives energy to the body. In one experiment I put a jelly-fish in contact with a solution of electrically charged substances, and it immediately responded by muscular contraction. I then put it in a substance that was a non-conductor and there was no response. In this way I concluded it was the electric charges which effected the muscular contraction, that a pure salt always acts as a poison to the egg, and in order not to have toxic effects it is necessary that the positive and negative electric charges should easily balance. A muscle is stimulated by electro-negatively charged particles, and prevented from contracting by electro-positively charged particles. "I have experimented with eggs of different low forms of animal life, with single protoplasmic cells, and with muscles. Professor Mathews has shown that my results hold true for nerves. I took the eggs of the fundulus and found that after they were fertilized they will develop in sea water.