LIFE. SI 



tional mysteries of their being united with ordinary matter, and 

 so united that life appears a power possessed by it. The editors 

 of a medical review have in vain searched John Hunter's works 

 for such an hypothesis Q, and Mr. Lawrence has had no better 

 success 1 ", so that I apprehend his meaning has been misunderstood 

 by those who constitute him its patron. 8 Granting for a moment 

 that life depends upon a peculiar, fine fluid, we have still to ac- 

 count for mind, because life is not mind, a cabbage is as much 

 gifted with life as the wisest man. Yet those whose faith makes 

 life a subtle fluid strangely imagine that the doctrine of a soul is 

 thereby advanced. The life of a brute requires a subtle fluid as 

 much as the life of a man, and of a cabbage as much as the life 

 of a brute. 



We have reason to believe that life never originates, but began 

 at the creation, and is communicated to assimilated matter, and 

 propagated from parent to offspring. It is the property of or- 

 ganised systems, producing various effects by various kinds of 

 organisation, but is not quite peculiar to organised matter, because 

 capable of being possessed by matter in a fluid state. 1 



* Annah of Medicine and Surgery > 1817, p. 373. In the Treatise on the 

 Blood, (p. 89. sq.) John Hunter says, " Life is a property (not a subtle fluid) 

 we do not understand." This property he conceives to reside in a certain matter 

 similar to the materials of the brain ; diffused through the body and even con- 

 tained in the blood. " The brain," he adds, " is a mass of this matter, not 

 diffused through any thing, for the purpose of that thing, but constituting an 

 organ in itself." This materia vitas is, therefore, not subtle, but pretty solid, and 

 no other than medullary matter ; and Vauquelin says he has discovered a fatty 

 matter in the blood, and which M. Chevreuil thinks he proves to be the same 

 as the substance of the brain and nerves. But the subtle-fl uidists would not tolerate 

 gross fatty matter, and J. Hunter calls life a property. 



T Lectures on the Physiology, Zoology, and Natural History of Man, p. 84. 

 8 J. Abernethy, Lectures delivered before the Royal College of Surgeons. 1814. 



* As the fluids which form the embryo must be endowed with life, organisation 

 cannot be the cause of life ; but in truth, organisation is the effect of life, although 

 when produced it becomes an instrument of life. The erroneousness of the 

 French doctrine, that " life is the result of organisation," was refuted in the 

 Annah of Medicine and Surgery. (1816, Sept. pp. 346. 386.) The error appears 

 to have arisen in some measure from the want of definition, the word life being 

 used sometimes properly for the power, sometimes improperly for the result. 

 Even if the result of life, the functions of a part, should be called its life, life 

 could not be said to be the result of organisation, but of a power to which organis- 

 ation is an instrument. The Greeks had distinct appellations for the cause and 

 the result ; the former they termed tyvxh ; the latter, (rij. 



