252 On the Domain of Physiology. 



the agencies already noticed, including the phenomena of 

 chemism which give rise to new species, make up together 

 the dynamic and chemic activities of matter, which constitute 

 the secular life of the planet. They are the geogenic agencies 

 which, in the course of ages, have moulded the mineral mass 

 of the earth, and from primeval chaos have evolved its pre- 

 sent order, formed its various rocks, filled the veins in its 

 crust with metals, ores, gems, and spars, and determined the 

 composition of its waters and its atmosphere. They still re- 

 gulate alike the terrestrial, the oceanic, and the aerial circu- 

 lation, and preside over the constant change and decay by 

 which the face of the earth is incessantly renewed, and the 

 conditions necessary to organic life are maintained. To the 

 study of these processes we may, with propriety, apply the 

 name of Mineral Physiology *. 



Appendix. 

 The doctrine of universal animation, or of an energy in- 

 hering in all matter, and that of the essential unity of all 

 manifestations of material energy, whether in dynamic, 

 chemic, or biotic phenomena, both of which we have main- 

 tained in the preceding pages, and especially in § 20, were 

 held by Sir Isaac Newton, who ascribed such phenomena to 

 the force of an immanent spirit. In the General Scholium 

 which closes the third volume of the Principia, following his 

 magnificent profession of Theism, he asserts the existence of 

 a " most subtile spirit, pervading and latent in gross bodies," 

 which spirit, by its force and activity, is the cause of gravita- 

 tion, of cohesion (and consequently of chemism, which he 

 elsewhere refers to peculiar aggregations of particles), of 

 electrical attraction and repulsion, of the phenomena of light 

 and of heat, and, finally, of all sensation, and of the power of 

 motion in animal bodies f. 



* I have elsewhere made use of this term iu speaking of the pheno= 

 mena connected with the decay and transformations of silicated rocks, as 

 belonging to " the domain of what I venture to call mineral physiology : ' 

 (Canadian Naturalist, 1880, new series, vol. ix. p. 435). 



t " Adjicere jam Kceret nonnulla de spiritu quodam subtihssimo cor- 

 pora crassa pervadente, et in iisdem latente ; cujus vi et actionibus parti- 

 culae corporum ad minimas distantias se mutuo attrahunt, et contiguae 

 facta? cohserent: et corpora electrica agunt ad distantias majores, tarn 

 repellendo quam attrahendo corpuscula vicina ; et lux emittitur, reflecti- 

 tur, refringitur, inflectitur, et corpora calefacit ; et sensatio onmis excita- 

 •fcur, et membra animalium ad voluntatem moventur, vibrationibus scili- 

 cet hujus spiritus per solida nervorum capillamenta ab externis sensuum 

 organis ad cerebrum et a cerebro in musculos propagatis." — Princip. 

 Math. lib. iii. Scholium Generale. 



The same doctrine is enunciated, though in a less precise form, in 1675, 



