THE BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES AND MEDICINE. 349 



matter " (" Introduction to Natural History," p. 6), lie is 

 prepared to renounce animism (1. c. p. 8), and his con- 

 ception of life is so completely physical that he thinks 

 of it as something which can exist in a state of com- 

 bination in the food. " The aliment we take in has in 

 it, in a fixed state, the real life ; and this does not be- 

 come active until it has got into the lungs ; for there it 

 is freed from its prison " (" Observations on Physiol- 

 ogy," p. 113). He also thinks that "It is more in ac- 

 cord with the general principles of the animal machine 

 to suppose that none of its effects are produced from any 

 mechanical principle whatever ; and that every effect is 

 produced from an action in the part ; which action is pro- 

 duced by a stimulus upon the part which acts, or upon 

 some other part with which this part sympathises so as 

 to take up the whole action " (1. c. p. 152). 



And Hunter is as clear as Wolff, with whose work 

 he was probably unacquainted, that "whatever life is, 

 it most certainly does not depend upon structure or or- 

 ganisation " (I. c. p. 114). 



Of course it is impossible that Hunter could have in- 

 tended to deny the existence of purely mechanical opera- 

 tions in the animal body. But while, with Borelli and 

 Boerhaave, he looked upon absorption, nutrition, and se- 

 cretion as operations effected by means of the small ves- 

 sels, he differed from the mechanical physiologists, who 

 regarded these operations as the result of the mechanical 

 properties of the small vessels, such as the size, form, 

 and disposition of their canals and apertures. Hunter, 



