406 THE LIFE OF MATTER. 



1. THE movj:ment of particles and molecules in brute bodies. 



It is iKjt only ill the celestial spaces that we must search for that 

 niol)ilitv of brute matter that imitates that of living' matter. In order 

 to lind it we have only to look about u,s or to interrogate physicists 

 and chemists. 



As to the geologists, M. le Dantec speaks somewhere of one of them 

 who divided minerals into living rocks, those susceptible of changing- 

 their structure, of undergoing- an evolution under the influence of 

 atmospheric causes; and dead rocks, those which, like clay, have found 

 at the end of all their changes a final state of repose. Jerome Cardan, 

 a celebrated scientist of the sixteenth century, at once mathematician, 

 naturalist, and physician, declared not only that stones live, but that 

 they sufi'er from disease, old age, and death. The jewelers of to-day 

 speak in this way concerning certain precious stones, turquoises, for 

 example. 



The alchemists carried these ideas to an extreme. It is not neces- 

 sary here to recall the past, to evoke hermetic beliefs or the dreams 

 of the alchemists, according to whom the difl'erent kinds of matter 

 lived, developed, and were transmuted into each other. 



We refer to precise and recent data, established })y the most expert 

 investigators, and related by one of them, Ch. Ed. (xuillaume, three 

 years ago, before the Helvetic Society of Natural Sciences. These 

 data show that the determinate forms of matter may live and di(>. in 

 the sense that they may become modified in a slow and continuous 

 manner, always in the same direction, until they have attained an 

 ultimate and definite state which is that of eternal repose. 



TJie hitestinal inocejuents of hodles. — The reply of Swift to an idle 

 fellow who spoke slightingly of work is well known; ''In England,'' 

 said the author of Gulliver, "men work, women work, horses work, 

 oxen work, fire works, and beer works; there is only the pig who 

 does nothing at all; he must be, therefore, the only gentleman in Eng- 

 land." We know veiy well that English gentlemen also work. 

 IiuUhhI, eveiybody and everything works. And the celeln'ated humor- 

 ist was nearer right than he supposed in comparing in this respect men 

 and things. Everything is at work; everything in nature toils and 

 strives, at every stage, in every degree. Innno))ility, repose, are 

 usually, in natural things, merely a false appc^arance; the seeming 

 quietude of matter is caused by our inability to appreciate its interior 

 agitation. Because of their miiuiteness we do not perceive the swarm- 

 ing particles that compose it, and which, inider the impassable surface 

 of l)odies, oscillate, displace each other, move to and fro, and group 

 themselves into forms and positions adapted to the conditions of the 

 environment. In comparison Avitli thes(> microscopic (dements we are 

 like the giant of Swift in the midst of the people of Lilliput; and this 

 is fai' Ixdow the actual facts. 



