(5) 4i 



and maidens join their hands in joyous accord. Earthly 

 matter again resumes its rights. Released from all 

 bonds, they impetuously follow their natural instincts, 

 and the day of his death is to them a day of nuptials. 1 



The view here put by Humboldt into the mouth of 

 Epicharmus may be taken as a fair representation of the 

 current opinion of all ages concerning vital force. To- 

 day, as truly as seventy-five years ago when Humboldt 

 wrote, the mysterious and awful phenomena of life are 

 commonly attributed to some controlling agent residing 

 in the organism to some independent presiding deity, 

 holding it in absolute subjection. Such a notion it was 

 which prompted Heraclitus to talk of a universal fire, 

 Van Helmont to propose his Archaeus, Hofmann his 

 vital fluid, Hunter his materia vitcz diffusa> and Hum- 

 boldt his vital force. 2 All these names assume the exist- 

 ence of a material or immaterial something, more or 

 less separable from the material body, and more or less 

 identical with the mind or soul, which is the cause of 

 the phenomena of living beings. But as science moved 

 irresistibly onward, and it became evident that the forces 

 of inorganic nature were neither deities nor imponder- 

 able fluids, separable from matter, but were simple af- 

 fections of it, analogy demanded a like concession in 

 behalf of vital force. 3 From the notion that the effects 

 of heat were due to an imponderable fluid called caloric, 

 discovery passed to the conviction that heat was but a 

 motion of material particles, and hence inseparable 

 from matter. To a like assumption concerning vitality 

 it was now but a step. The more advanced thinkers in 

 science of to-day, therefore, look upon the life of the 

 living form as inseparable from its substance, and be- 



