250 ZOOLOGICAL PHILOSOPHY 



strength and properties that they cannot have in hfeless bodies ; so 

 that, by their omission to reflect that one and the same cause 

 necessarily has varied effects when it acts upon objects of different 

 nature and in different conditions, they have adopted for the 

 explanation of the observed facts a route altogether opposite from 

 what they ought to have followed. 



It has indeed been said that living bodies have the power of resisting 

 the laws and forces to which all non-living bodies or inert matter are 

 subject, and that they are controlled by laws pecuhar to themselves. 



Nothing is more improbable, and nothing moreover is so far from 

 being proved as this alleged property of living bodies for resisting 

 the forces to which all other bodies are submitted. 



This doctrine, which is very widely accepted, and is to be found set 

 forth in all modern works on this subject, appears to me to have been 

 invented in the first place to escape from the difficulty of explaining 

 the causes of the various phenomena of life, and in the second place 

 to afford some explanation of the faculty which living bodies possess 

 of forming for themselves their own substance, of making good the 

 wastage midergone by the material composing their parts, and lastly 

 of giving rise to combinations which would never have existed without 

 them. Thus in the absence of any solution, the difficulty has been 

 shelved by the invention of special laws, without any effort being 

 made to ascertain what they are. 



In order to prove that bodies possessing life are subject to a different 

 set of laws from that followed by lifeless bodies, and that the former 

 possess in consequence a special force of which the chief property is 

 said to be their release from the sway of chemical affinities, M. Richerand 

 cites the phenomena presented by the living human body, viz. : " the 

 decomposition of food by the digestive organs, the absorption of their 

 nutritive material by the lacteals, the circulation of these nutritive 

 juices in the blood, the changes which they undergo in the lungs and 

 secretory glands, the capacity for receiving impressions from external 

 objects, the power of approaching or flying from them, in short all 

 the functions carried on in the animal economy." In addition to these 

 phenomena, this savant names ag more direct proofs, sensibility and 

 contractihty, two properties with which are endowed the organs that 

 carry out the functions of the animal economy {Èlétnents de Physiologie, 

 vol. i., p. 81). 



Although the organic phenomena just mentioned are not universal 

 to hving bodies nor even to animals, they are yet characteristic of a 

 great number of the latter and of the living human body ; and they 

 do undoubtedly show the existence of a special force animating living 

 bodies ; but this force in nowise results from laws peculiar to these 



