coincide with functional activity, but is its measure and expression.
The Two Kinds of Phenomena of Vitality.—Another point on which Claude Bernard is right and his opponent is wrong is not less fundamental. What are we to understand by functional phenomena? This is the very point at issue. Now, in the mind of physiologists, this expression has a perfectly definite meaning. It is not so with Le Dantec. Physiologists who have studied animals rather high in organization—in which the differentiation of phenomena enables us to grasp the fundamental distinction—have readily recognized that the phenomena of living beings are divided into two categories. There are some which are intermittent, alternative, which take place, or grow stronger at certain moments, but which cannot be continuous—they are the functional acts; there are others in which this characteristic of explosives, energetic expenditure and intermittence, do not appear—they are, in general, the nutritive acts. The muscle which contracts shows functional activity. It has an activity and a repose. During this apparent repose we must not say that it is dead; it has a life, but that life is obscure as far as the salient fact of functional movement is concerned. The salivary gland which throws up waves of saliva when the food is introduced and masticated in the mouth, or when the chord of the tympanum is at work, is in a state of functional activity; this is the salient phenomenon. But before, though nothing, absolutely nothing, was flowing through the glandular canal, yet the gland was not reduced to the condition of a dead organ: it was living a more obscure, a less evident life. The microscopical researches of Kühne, Lea, and Langley,
