24 



corporalecl into the tissue of our organs*. These motions, to make 

 use of an ingenious comparison, resemble those of the hour-hand, com- 

 pared with the second-hand of a watch. The hour-hand appears motion- 

 less, and yet in twelve hours it describes the whole circumference of the 

 dial-plate, round which the other hand moves in one minute, with a mo- 

 tion that is visible. 



In considering life through the great series of beings that possess it, 

 we have seen that those in which it is most limited, or rather in which it 

 consists of the least number of actions, and phenomena, vegetables, for 

 instance, and animals like the polypus, which have no brain, no distinct 

 nervous system, are at once endowed with sensibility and contractility in 

 all their parts. All living beings, all the organs which enter into their 

 composition, are impregnated, if we may be allowed the expression, with 

 these two faculties, necessarily co-existing, and which show themselves 

 by internal and nutritive motions, obscure, indeed, and to be distinguish- 

 ed only by their effects. These two faculties appear to exist in the de- 

 gree absolutely required for enabling the fluids that pervade all the parts 

 of a living body, to induce the action by which these parts are to assimi- 

 late such fluids. It is clear, that the two properties of feeling and of 

 motion are indispensable to all parts of the body. They are properties 

 universally diffused through organized and living matter, but they exist 

 withous possessing any peculiar organ or instrument of actionf. Were it 

 not for these two faculties, how would the different parts act on the 

 blood, or on the fluid which supplies its place, so as to obtain from it 

 the materials subservient to nutrition and the different secretions ? These 

 faculties are therefore given to every thing that has life to animals, 

 to vegetables; to man in his waking hours, or in his most profound 

 sleep, to the foetus, to the child that is born, to the organs of the assimi- 

 lating functions, and to those which connect us with surrounding beings. 

 Both these faculties, obscure, and inseparable, preside over the circula- 

 tion of the blood, of the fluids, and, in short, over all the phenomena of 

 nutrition. 



Though this kind of sensibility is always latent or concealed, it is other- 

 wise with regard to contractility, which may be sensible or otherwise. 

 The bone, which takes up the phosphate of lime, to which it owes its 

 solidity, exerts that action without our being aware of its taking place, 

 except by its effect : but the heart which feels the presence of the blood, 

 without any consciousness, on our part, of such sensation, exerts motions 

 that are easily perceptible, but over which we have no controul, either to 

 suspend or accelerate them. 



Vital properties in so weak a degree, would not have been sufficient to 



* If the suggestions offered, in the Note at p. 12, respecting the constitution of the 

 different kinds of muscular fibres, were adopted, the explanation of the properties, sen- 

 sibility and contractility, and the relations which they hold with the circle of vital func- 

 tions, wov-lu be more apparei. f and better understood. Copland, 



f- Tiiis is an impossibility. If there be feeling and motion, a material capable affecting, 

 aud a power capable of moving are presupposed. If the feeling 1 and motion belong- to 

 the fluid independent of organization, the results are merely plays of chemical affini- 

 ties, and the changes taking' place, mere superpositions. But the polypus is confess- 

 edly organized and digests, so that although we do cut it in pieces, the parts or whole 

 reproduced, are formed by the action of the remaining 1 organization on the fluids, and 

 not by the fluids themselves. The feeling- and motion are attributable solely to impres- 

 sions made on a nervous and muscular system, however singular in its kind. Godman. 



