OPINIONS ON GENERAL PHYSIOLOGY 171 
qualities of the primeval protoplasmic matter fitted 
to receive the first traces of organization and life: 
“Every mass of substance homogeneous in appear- 
ance, of a gelatinous or mucilaginous consistence, 
whose parts, coherent among themselves, will be in 
the state nearest fluidity, but will have only a con- 
sistence sufficient to constitute containing parts, will 
be the body most fitted to receive the first traces of 
organization and life.” 
In the third part of the Pzlosophie zoologique 
Lamarck considers the physical causes of feeling—z.e., 
those which form the productive force of actions, and 
those giving rise to intelligent acts. After describing 
the nervous system and its functions, he discusses the 
nervous fluid. His physiological views are based on 
those of Richerand’s Physzologie, which he at times 
quotes. 
Lamarck’s thoughts on the nature of the nervous 
fluid (Recherches sur le fluide nerveux) are curious 
and illustrative of the gropings after the truth of his 
age. 
He claims that the supposed nervous fluid has 
much analogy to the electric, that it is the feu ¢théré 
“animalized by the circumstances under which it 
occurs.” In his Recherches sur lorganisation des 
corps vtvans (1802) he states that, as the result of 
changes continually undergone by the principal fluids 
of an animal, there is continually set free in a state of 
feu fixé a special fluid, which at the instant of its 
disengagement occurs in the expansive state of the 
caloric, then becomes gradually rarefied, and insen- 
sibly arrives at the state of an extremely subtile fluid 
