26o LIFE AND DEATH. 



is SO exclusively a feature of the living being as it 

 appears, and if many brute bodies do not present 

 something analogous to it. We may answer in no 

 uncertain tones. 



Bichat was wrong when he contrasted in this 

 respect brute bodies with living bodies. Vital 

 properties, he said, are temporary; it is their nature 

 to be exhausted ; in time they are used up in the 

 same body. Physical properties, on the contrary, are 

 eternal. Brute bodies have neither a beginning nor 

 an inevitable end, neither age, nor evolution; they 

 remain as immutable as death, of which they are the 

 image. 



Mobility and Mutability of the Sidereal World. — 

 This is not true, in the first place, of the sidereal 

 bodies. The ancients held the sidereal world to be 

 immutable and incorruptible. The doctrine of the 

 incorruptibility of the heavens prevailed up to the 

 seventeenth century. The observers who at that 

 epoch directed towards the heavens the first telescope, 

 which Galileo had just invented, were struck with 

 astonishment at discovering a change in that celestial 

 firmament which they had hitherto believed incor- 

 ruptible, and at perceiving a new star that appeared 

 in the constellation Ophiuchus. Such changes no 

 longer surprise us. The cosmogonic system of 

 Laplace has become familiar to all cultivated minds, 

 and every one is accustomed to the idea of the con- 

 tinual mobility and evolution of the celestial world. 

 "The stars have not always existed," writes M. Faye; 

 " they have had a period of formation ; they will 

 likewise have a period of decline, followed by final 

 extinction." 



Thus all the bodies of inanimate nature are not 



