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nothing could be more ridiculous, or farther from his views, 

 which he explained as follows : 



" 1 have shown that there are various kinds or degrees of 

 life ; such as that of a man in full possession of health and 

 faculties ; of a man who neither sees, hears, feels, tastes, 

 breathes, nor circulates blood, yet is alive and recovers his 

 powers; of a body recently dead, as is the expression, in 

 which certain secretions take place, and which is still suscep- 

 tible of certain stimuli. I have referred to the vitality, in 

 some cases persistent, of an amputated limb; to the retention 

 of life, for a short time, in the decollated heads of men and 

 other animals, in their headless trunks, in small portions of 

 their flesh when removed, in their detached hearts, and in 

 their blood. I have instanced the symptoms of life in vege- 

 tables, and also of a peculiar life in some organic beings of so 

 feeble a nature that for ages it had been uncertain whether 

 they were animals or vegetables, and the vital principle was 

 never proved to exist in them. Life is then a quality which 

 assumes almost as many varieties, degrees, and modes as there 

 are classes and states of animals or vegetables. 



•' I have suggested that it were contrary to the order of 

 nature to suppose that life is utterly extinguished at the point 

 usually called inanimate; that Nature's works glide from one 

 form to another by imperceptible gradations ; that it would be 

 a striking anomaly if the general analogy of her proceedings 

 were departed from in this instance, and if there were nothing 

 intermediate to fill up the vast chasm supposed to exist 

 between life and actual exaniraation. I have endeavoured to 

 render it probable that there is a grade of life, not recognizable 

 to our senses, and beneath that of the meanest vegetable, 

 which may be exalted by natural processes to the highest de- 

 gree of intellectual vitality. This low grade is what I call the 

 vitality of matter. 



•♦ But, beside all considerations of analogy and probability, 

 I have adduced the testimony of Scripture to prove that the 



