6lO PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS. [aNNO 1748. 



salts and volatile parts, which evaporated copiously, the substance became softer, 

 more divitled, and more attenuated: to the naked eye, or to the touch, it ap- 

 peared a gelatinous matter, but in the microscope was seen to consist of innu- 

 merable filaments ; and then it was that the substance was in its highest point 

 of exaltation, just breaking, as it were, into life. These filaments would swell 

 from an interior force so active, and so productive, that even before they resolved 

 into, or shed any moving globules, they were perfect zoophytes teeming with 

 life, and self-moving. 



If any particle was originally very small and spherical, as many among those 

 of the pounded seeds were, it was highly agreeable to observe its little starlike 

 form with rays diverging on all sides, and every ray moving with extreme viva- 

 city. The extremities likewise of this gelatinous substance exhibited the same 

 appearances, active beyond expression, bringing forth, and parting continually 

 with, moving progressive particles of various forms, spherical, oval, oblong, and 

 cylindrical, which advanced in all directions spontaneously, and were the true 

 microscopical animals so often observed by naturalists. This brought to his 

 mind a phenomenon often taken notice of, and seen with surj)rize, particles de- 

 tached by the reaction of the water from the extremities of the fins of muscles, 

 which yet continue to move progressively. He thought it sufficiently explained 

 by these observations; and that it is more than probable, that muscles, polypes, 

 and other kinds of this nature, vegetate in a manner analogous to this gelatinous 

 matter. See fig. 6. 



In the infusion of pounded wheat, the first appearances, after an exhalation 

 of volatile parts, as in every other infusion, were the second or third day clouds 

 of moving atoms, which he supposed to have been produced by a prompt vege- 

 tation of the smallest and almost insensible parts, and which required not so 

 long a time to digest as the more gross. These in a day or two more entirely 

 disappeared; all was then quiet, and nothing to be seen, but dead irregularly 

 formed particles, absolutely unactive till about 14 or 15 days after. From these 

 uniting into one mass sprung filaments, zoophytes all, and swelling from a force 

 lodged within each fibre. These were in various states, just as this force had 

 happened to diversify them ; some resembled pearl necklaces, and were a kind of 

 microscopical coralloids ; others were uniform throughout their whole length, 

 except just the very extrenuty, which swelled into a head like a reed, if the 

 force had acted equally on all sides, or like the head of a bone at its joint, if 

 the matter in its expansion had bore to either side. These filaments were all 

 zoophytes, so teeming with life, that whenever on taking a drop from the sur- 

 face of this infusion, he had separated the extremity of a filament so short as 

 not to consist of above 4 or 5 globules chaplet-wise ; they would advance pro- 

 gressively and in concert, with a kind of vermicular motion, for a little way. 



