true that M. H. Bouasse protests in the name of the physico-mathematicians against the employment of these figurative expressions. But has he not himself written "a twisted wire is a wound-up watch," and elsewhere, "the properties of bodies depend at every moment upon all anterior modifications"? Does not this imply that they retain in some manner the impression of their past evolution ? Powerful deformative agencies leave a trace of their action; they modify the body's condition of molecular aggregation, and some physicists go so far as to say that they even modify its chemical constitution. With the exception of M. Duhem, the disciples of the mechanical school who have studied elasticity admit that the effect of an external force upon a body depends upon the forces which have been previously acting on it, and not merely upon those which are acting on it at the present moment. Its present state cannot be anticipated, it is the recapitulation of preceding states. The effect of a torsional force upon a new wire will be different from that of the same force upon a wire previously subjected to torsions and detorsions. It was with reference to actions of this kind that Boltzmann, in 1876, declared that "a wire that has been twisted or drawn out remembers for a certain time the deformations which it has undergone." This memory is obliterated and disappears after a certain definite period. Here then, in a problem of static equilibrium, we find introduced an unexpected factor—time.
To sum up, it is the physicists themselves who have indicated the correspondence between the condition of existence in many brute bodies and that in many living bodies. It cannot be expected that
