coloration before reducing it; the salt stops at the stage which protects it best. It stops at red, if it is red light that assails it, because in becoming red by reflection it best repels that light—i.e., it absorbs it the least.
It may then be advantageous, for the comprehension of natural phenomena, to regard the transformation of inanimate matter as manifestations of a kind of internal life.
Conclusion. Relations of the Surrounding Medium to the Living Being and the Brute Body.—Brute bodies, then, are not immutable any more than are living bodies. Both depend on the medium that surrounds them, and they depend upon it in the same way. Life brings together, brings into conflict, an appropriate organism and a suitable environment. Auguste Comte and Claude Bernard have taught us that vital phenomena result from the reciprocal action of these two factors which are in close correlation. It is also from the reciprocal action of the environment and the brute body that inevitably result the phenomena which that body presents. The living body is sometimes more sensitive to variations of the ambient medium than is the brute body, but at other times the reverse is the case. For example, there is no living organism as impressionable to any kind of stimulus whatever as the bolometer is to the slightest variations of temperature.
There can only be, then, one chemically immutable body—namely, the atom of a simple body, since, by its very definition, it remains unaltered and intangible in combinations. This notion of an unalterable atom has, however, itself been attacked by the doctrine of the ionization of particles due to Sir J. J. Thomson;
