OF LIFE. 501 



solar heat maintains the fluidity of the ocean, the 

 mobility of the air, the transformations of che- 

 mistry, and the growth of vegetation ; or that 

 animal heat maintains the fluidity of the blood, 

 the action of the heart, brain, and all the other 

 organs. As I have already proved that caloric 

 is the active principle in light, and that all the 

 different forms of electricity are modifications of 

 this universal principle, it is needless to dwell 

 longer on the electrical theory of life. 



From the earliest dawn of science in India, 

 Chaldea, Egypt, and Greece, down to this pe- 

 riod, the organizing principle was almost univer- 

 sally regarded as an independent, ethereal, and 

 refined species of matter. Even the fathers of 

 the church, including St. Ambrose, St. Hilary, 

 Irenseus, Tatian, Tertullian, and others, main- 

 tained that there is nothing in nature, whether 

 visible or invisible, which is not material ; and 

 that the soul, or animating principle, whether 

 it inhabit the body or not, is of a corporeal na- 

 ture. But since the publication of Sir Isaac 



tion, and produces an extrication of caloric." (P. 17 and 20.) In 

 other parts of the same work, he contends that all febrile diseases 

 have their seat in the cineritious portion of the brain and nerves ; 

 and that convulsions have their seat in the white or medullary 

 part of the same system, whether arising from excessive cold, irri* 

 tation of the bowels, the action of narcotic poisons, the virus of 

 a rabid animal, emotions of fear, wounds, &c. ; that hydro- 

 phobia is a leaven which poisons the nervous system ; and that the 

 smallpox virus may produce its effect by some chemical or 

 trical action, positive or negative, on the nervous tissue. 



