bioplasm! Oh, now for some one to tell us whence bioplasm has its life! The mystery it is all there, at last! Deeper truth than many dream does Tennyson sing "Flower in the crannied wall, I pluck you out of the crannies; I should know what God and man is." But the "little flower" dies, and its whole life ceases with it does then all bioplasm die? Yes, it dies: dies in the living flower as well as in the dead man dies in the organism living, and dies with the organism dead, for these two things must be distinguished. But how does it die? Very naturally in truth: it dies from hunger, and, dying so, shrivels up out of being-buried alive in the prison itself has made. That is not poetry, I assure you, but simple fact. It dies, we say, if its food be stopped; and its food is stopped by the thickening, hardening, and retention of the walls it has formed round itself, preventing the ingress of its pabulum through the otherwise porous material. In this way, too, the organism itself sometimes dies with it, as in the case of liver and kidney disease, the so-called "hardening" of these organs being simply the hardening of the material the bioplasts have formed, and their own consequent death. But it may, and does, die daily in the ordinary course of its work, when it puts off its mortal coil at the surface of the body, and ceases from man along with that coil, the formed material, it has thus put off; but its death here means the man's life. There is one case more, and that is the case in which, strangely enough, bioplasm has the victory, and remains in vivid life after it has killed the body, whether of man or beast. Surely strange that the thing which is our life should be the swift and certain cause of death; but it is as simple as true. bioplasm may be starved, so it may be overfed: it may drain the nourishment from the blood, or, extending itself rapidly into the surrounding tissue, it may convert that also into itself, making the organ or organs one mass of bioplasm, thus killing them and the body at the same time as effectually as, and much more swiftly than, if it had been itself starved-illustrations of which are found in pneumonia, cancer, inflammation, and fever. Just as "Under It is thus, then, that organisms grow and die; and one other fact must complete our statement of the case for bioplasm. That fact is that it is the centre of the bioplast that forms the true living point of the mass. It is in the centre that the wellspring of living force arises, spreading itself thence in circles to the circumference. certain conditions," says Beale, "the nucleus may increase and exhibit all the phenomena of ordinary bioplasm-new nuclei may be developed within it, new nucleoli within them; so that ordinary bioplasm may become formed material, its nucleus growing larger and taking its place. The original nucleolus in this case becomes the nucleus, and new nucleoli make their appearance in what was the original nucleolus. The whole process consists of evolution1 from centres, and the production of new centres within pre-existing centres, a process not comparable with any known physical change, but peculiar to and characteristic of the living world. . . These new centres may be few or very numerous, and there may be many successive series of such centres, and each, when it comes to be developed, may manifest powers different from the pre-existent series. And in certain cases it would appear that as this process of formation of new centres, one on another, proceeds, new powers are acquired, or, if we suppose that all possessed the same powers, those masses only which were last produced retain them and manifest them when placed under favourable conditions." Thus the bioplasmic centre, with its "mere points" welling up there and increasing outwards, is the true physical birthplace of the animal and vegetable worlds. If we could only see through and beyond these little points!-these door-ways--into what? 2 One may with reason be startled, if not oppressed, by the vast reach and profundity of the problems which a tiny speck of bioplasm thus opens out for him. We began these Science-Sermons with the study of the great cosmos as presented in the principle of continuity, and we tried to see our way into the beyond there; we have travelled from thence at last to the smallest point of living matter the universe discloses is there any passage into the beyond here? Clear it is becoming to modern eyes on what merest touch of physical standingground the battle of spiritual powers or molecular machinery, of life and immortality or organization and nothingness, of God or matter, must from this time be fought. No physical discovery has yet been made at all equivalent to bioplasm in physical and spiritual interest. In one such little speck the human problems of the world are centred; and yet if these problems are not essentially decided for us before we come there for answer, what reply can a bit of mucus-like substance give us? In any case it will only render back our own answer, give up to us what we have first put into it. The whole battle and its decision, in truth, are not in the bioplasm, though that will suffice as occasion, but in the human thought and feeling,-there the answer man will render, or make nature render, must already implicitly or explicitly be. Certainly the facts, legitimately read, of themselves tell some way; but then, I apprehend, that, in the necessity of the case, and as the clearest spirits confess and affirm, precisely the answers we want and need, the ultimate answers, and about which the whole battle is continually waged,—just these answers the facts in question cannot give us; nor is it that they, indeed, are specially impotent to disclose the hidden realities of the last things, whatever these may be (for surely if any facts could unlock the inner treasure-house this 1 Let no sensitive anti-evolutionist be alarmed at this storming of the citadel itself; Beale is no Darwinian nor Spencerian either. 2 Protoplasm, pp. 212, 213. bioplasm might), but it is, as we say the clearest spirits confess, that the ultimate reading of any natural fact is for ever beyond us. From which it plainly follows that, come from where it may, not in NATURE is, or can be, the final word on human nature or on human destiny; nor can we even seem to obtain a response from her here, except on the already formed and doubly false assumption that nature does disclose the Ultimate Verities through her facts, and the further secret, with that, of their attitude towards us now and their behaviour about to be. But in the meantime, and till we fully recognize this incompetence of nature's, we are in such inveterate haste to make her render back our own pre-conceptions or constitutional or educational prejudices, that we keep incessantly outstripping the facts, and prophesying beforehand the final victory for one side or the other, making our modern age one continual stir of intellectual see-saw from doubt to confident assertion, or of mid-air suspension between these states: and all for want, it would appear, of one of two things, either of an actual and reliable and rationally provable revelation of ultimate realities to hand, or of a true, high-minded, supposably Divine-like patience under the necessarily eternal uncertainty of what our agnosticism covers. Between the wisdom of reverently believed knowledge of the Actual on the one hand, and the wisdom of a manly, honest acknowledgment of agnostic uncertainty on the other, stands the one mental imbecility of the philosophical world, the folly of asserting that nature's last word is the last word possible, covering the presumptuous assumption that man is the capable interpreter of that word. Of what intellectual and moral use then is bioplasm, or any other fact or plasm of nature? Of the greatest-in the case of bioplasm, the greatest that any discovery of nature can be: the probable instrument and occasion of scientifically demonstrating what of ultimate reality he already, and on other grounds, receives and holds for true. We are thus well plunged in medias res-in the deeps of speculation and of rational inference; let us reverently thank the only Saviour if we are not now, as perhaps beforetime, swimming for dear life there, and seeing no help or safety. To handle even lightly the problems which bioplasm invokes would be out of all question here. We may at most only indicate some of them. The first clearly is, By what means, power, agency, or cause does bioplasm live? Is that cause molecular or vital? In other words, is the (so-called) life of the bioplasm the result of chemical combination, or of some such, as yet unknown, element as may be provisionally, or even now fitly, designated by the term vital? My answer would be that those who contend against the molecular view are as much wide of the facts as those who contend for that alone; that there is sufficient evidence for both, and as much for the one as for the other. Clearly, if bioplasm is not molecular it is nothing; but is it therefore wholly molecular? Would not the true view be that the particular molecular combination of bioplasm is the occasion or medium of those powers which mark its action off as vital? I need not prophesy, but this is the issue that is certain to come; though men are so determinedly partizan at present that none can see any good in the other's view. 2nd. By what power or means does bioplasm convert dead matter into living matter, and again redistribute that matter as dead? 3rd. On the assumption of the indication by bioplasm, or as otherwise taught, of a spiritual source of life-a spiritual world-is it not through bioplasm that a vital relation with such world is sustained? and does not the movement of bioplasm, arising in central points and passing from centre to circumference, indicate something, the mode perhaps, of the connection in question? 4th. Have we not here some data towards the settlement of the problem of the relation of life to organization? 5th. Has not bioplasm a direct bearing on some distinctively New Church questions? 6th, and last, Are we not led inevitably from bioplasm to the question of health ?—not to speak of doctors' questions of disease. Upon this point I cannot refrain from a word. If what we have said as to bioplasm be true, the health of the body manifestly depends on three things:-(1) Good food in order to the sustenance of bioplasm; (2) sufficient exercise in order to the food's proper assimilation; and (3)—oh, all ears hear it! it does not quite inculcate a descent to Avernus-and (3), I say, and say it with an honest, because studied, sense of its meaning,—a weekly or bi-weekly Turkish bath! Tell me how else than by this last you will get thoroughly rid of that superfluous, poisonous, dead, and deadly formed material which is ever being thrown off as an encumbrance by the living bioplasm? Believe me, this same material unremoved (and unremoved it mostly is in our English population) does as much for the pockets of the doctors as my third inculcation would do against them,meaning no harm to that laborious, self-sacrificing, prejudiced brotherhood, and asking no pardons, but speaking straightforward, clearly ascertained scientific fact.1 Will any agent but sufficient heat so act upon the tissues, through and through, as to effectually cleanse them. from these lingering usurpers of a dead generation? Ask the doctors of your acquaintance to answer that question for you, else answer it practically for yourself by doing what I say. You will at least have got from these Sermons a truth of some efficient use; and wishing you well of its application, I take a very kindly leave of you. THOMAS CHILD. 1 See Dr. Erasmus Wilson's "Healthy Skin," his "Turkish Bath," etc.; or almost anybody who writes on the subject, or adopts the practice taught. SWEDENBORG AND THE LORD'S SECOND COMING. VI. [THE question of the "sexuality of plants" has been made the subject of another communication in the last number of the Intellectual Repository by S. T.; yet the writer has failed to bring forward a single argument subversive of the position taken up on this subject in the theological writings of Swedenborg. In order to prevent this subject from being misunderstood, it will be useful to place it in a clearer rational light from these writings. We read : "It is one thing which man receives from his father, and another which he receives from his mother. From his father man receives all that is internal,the soul or the life itself is from the father; but from the mother he gets all that is external. In short the interior man, or the spirit itself, is from the father, but the exterior man, or the body itself, is from the mother. This every one may comprehend from this consideration alone, that by the father is implanted the soul itself, which begins to clothe itself with a bodily form in the ovum; whatever is afterwards added, both in the ovum and the womb, is the mother's; for no increment is received from any other source" (A. C. 1815). "In the seed of every one from which he is conceived, there is an offshoot or propagation of the soul of the father in its fulness, within a certain covering from the elements of nature; by these in the womb of the mother is formed his body" (T. C. R. 103). Such is the generation of man, and such also is the generation of every animal, whether mammal, bird, or reptile. In all of these cases the soul or the spiritual principle, in all its fulness, comes from the male animal, while the substance of the bodily form is furnished by the female animal; "the soul itself," as we read, "clothing itself with a bodily form in the ovum, and afterwards in the womb." We see, therefore, that all that the female mammal furnishes is the substance or the material for the body, together with the needful temperature which is required in order that the soul may cover itself with a body; although this in the case of birds or reptiles may also be furnished by artificial sources. Whether the material for the body be furnished immediately by the blood of the female animal, as in the case of the viviparous animals, or whether it be laid up within the shell of an egg, as in the oviparous, is immaterial-the result in both cases is the same, for the body in either case is formed of the juices or the substance of the female animals. The case in the generation of plants, however, is altogether different. The seeds of plants, different from the eggs of birds, insects, and fishes, contain simply the germ, the spiritual principle of the plants, and only sufficient nutriment to cover this germ with matter. When seeds, therefore, germinate-with the few exceptions which will be noticed below-they simply put forth a germ, and not the whole plant, unless they are placed in the womb of mother earth, by whose agency the spiritual principle of the plant contained in the germ, is covered with a body, and thus developed into a full plant. While therefore the |