OPINIONS ON GENERAL PHYSIOLOGY 161 
more likely that these simple organisms are them- 
selves regenerated? After much verbiage and repeti- 
tion, he concludes: 
“We may conceive that the simplest organisms 
can arise from a minute mass of substances which 
possess the following conditions—namely, which will 
have solid parts in a state nearest the fluid conditions, 
consequently having the greatest suppleness and 
only sufficient consistence to be susceptible of con- 
stituting the parts contained in it. Such is the 
condition of the most gelatinous organized bodies. 
“Through sucha mass of substances the subtile and 
expansive fluids spread, and, always in motion in the 
milieu environing it, unceasingly penetrate it and 
likewise dissipate it, arranging while traversing this 
mass the internal disposition of its parts, and render- 
ing it suitable to continually absorb and to exhale 
the other environing fluids which are able to penetrate 
into its interior, and which are susceptible of being 
contained. 
“These other fluids, which are water charged with 
dissolved (dzssous) gas, or with other tenuous sub- 
stances, the atmospheric air, which contains water, 
etc., I call containable fluids, to distinguish them from 
subtile fluids, such as caloric, electricity, etc., which 
no known bodies are believed to contain. 
“The containable fluids absorbed by the small 
gelatinous mass in question remain almost motionless 
in its different parts, because the non-containable 
subtile fluids which always penetrate there do not 
permit it. 
“ In this way the uncontainable fluids at first mark 
out the first traces of the simplest organization, and 
consequently the containable fluids by their move- 
ments and their other influences develop it, and 
with time and all the favorable circumstances com- 
plete: it. 
IT 
