invital

The amoeba — a mere shapeless mass of moving sarcode — digests rapidly and constantly without a trace of organism! An organism when dead we assume to be chemically the same as the living organism, but we cannot prove it. An analysis of living protoplasm is impossible. That there is a force — an activity — in the vital form totally wanting in the invital, it is almost absurd to insist : what that something is we cannot tell — perhaps shall never know.

1873, William Lonsdale Watkinson, William Theophilus Davison, The London Quarterly Review, volume 39, page 252