The meeting of the British Association at Dundee opened on
Wednesday night, when Professor Schafer, of Edinburgh University, delivered the Presidential Address on the Origin, Nature, and Maintenance of Life. After commenting on the inadequacy of the various definitions of life, the President observed that the difficulty had been increased by the breaking-down of the dividing line between animate and inanimate nature. Physicists had shown that movements commonly regarded as indications of - life were precisely paralleled in substances which no one by any stretch of imagination could regard as living. Growth and reproduction no longer constituted the test of discriminating between life and non-life, since inorganic crystals grew and multiplied and reproduced their like, while chemical reagents—even a mechanical or electrical stimulus—were capable of starting the process of fertilization in living organisms. In short, "vitalism" as a working hypothesis had been undermined, most of its superstructure had toppled over, and the term " vital force " was an expression of ignorance which could bring us no further along the path of knowledge.
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