ORGANIC MECHANISM. 57 



proper place, this little spherical body, scarcely larger than 

 a pea, is composed of upwards of five millions of fibres, which 

 lock into one another by means of more than sixty-two 

 thousand five hundred millions of teeth. If such be the 

 complication of a portion only of the eye of that animal, 

 how intricate must be the structure of the other parts of the 

 same organ, having equally important offices! What ex- 

 quisite elaboration must those textures have received whose 

 functions are still more refined! What marvellous w^ork- 

 manship must have been exercised in the organization of the 

 nerves and of the brain, those subtle instruments of the hiirher 

 animal faculties, and of which even the modes of action are 

 to us not merely inscrutable, but surpassing all our powers 

 of conception! 



It is from the energies of life alone that organic forms are 

 produced. No fabric achieved by human power ever ap- 

 proached in refinement the simplest of nature's works. The 

 utmost efforts of the ingenuity or skill of man in the con- 

 struction of the most delicate machinery is infinitely sur- 

 passed by the most ordinary of the mechanisms which are 

 presented to our view in living bodies. However success- 

 ful may be human artists in their attempts to contrive au- 

 tomata, which shall exactly imitate different animal move- 

 ments, there will always be wanting that internal principle 

 of action derived from a higher source than mechanism 

 can supply, and without which these highly wrought works 

 of man, like the unvivified statues of Prometheus, must re- 

 main for evermore masses of insentient and inert materials. 



As the living functions imply the mechanical action and 

 reaction of parts which cohere in some definite order of 

 arrangement so as to preserve that determinate form to which 

 they constantly tend to return on being displaced, it is im- 

 possible to conceive that a mere fluid can exercise these 

 functions; because the particles of a fluid, being equally 

 moveable in every direction, have no determinate relative 

 situations, and possess no character of permanence. All or- 

 ganic and living structures, therefore, must be composed of 

 solid as well as fluid partsj although the_'proportion between 



Vol. I. 8 . 



