- 
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a 
INTRODUCTION, | 9 
as to arrest even one of the partial motions of which it is com- 
posed, the general movement of life must cease. 
Every organized body, independently of the qualities com- 
mon to its tissue, has a form peculiar to itself, not merely ge- 
neral and external, but extending to the detail of the structure 
of each of its parts; and it is upon this form, which determines 
the particular direction of each of the partial movements that 
take place in it, that depends the complication of the general 
movement of its life—it constitutes its species and renders it 
what itis. Each part co-operates in this general movement 
by a peculiar action, and experiences from it particular effects, 
so that in every being life is a whole, resulting from the mu- 
tual action and re-action of all its parts. 
Life, then, in general, pre-supposes organization in gene- 
ral, and the life proper to each individual being pre-supposes 
an organization peculiar to that being, just as the movement 
of a clock pre-supposes the clock; and accordingly we behold 
life only in beings that are organized and formed to enjoy it, 
and all the efforts of philosophy have never been able to dis- 
cover matter in the act of organization, neither per se, nor by 
any external cause. In fact, life exercising upon the elements 
which at every moment form part of the living body, and 
upon those which it attracts to it, an action contrary to that 
which, without it, would be produced by the usual chemical 
affinities, it seems impossible that it can be produced by these 
affinities, and yet we know of no other power in nature capa- 
ble of re-uniting previously separated. molecules. 
The birth of organized beings is, therefore, the greatest _ 
mystery of the organic economy and of all nature: we see _ 
them developed, but never being formed; nay more, all those 
whose origin we can trace, have at first been attached toa _ 
body similar in form to their own, but which was developed 
before them—in a word, to a parent. So long as the offspring 
has no independent existence, but ,participates in that of: its 
parent, it is called a germ. 
The place to, which the germ Is - attached, and the cause 
which detaches -it and gives it an pide icy life; ; vary; 3 but 
Vou IB si? j 
irae > ys s BY hs, 
at Te Sere 
> ae + (6 
