IRRITABILITY, AND MUSCULAR POWER. 



1Q5 



iyseded in proving that the fluid thus traced to be given or received was a 

 true electric aura ; that it might, in like manner, be obtained by a pile of 

 metallic plates, of two or three different kinds, separated from each other 

 by water, or wetted cloth or wadding ; and be so accumulated by a multi- 

 plication of such plates, as to produce the most powerful agency in all che* 

 mistry. It is not necessary to pursue this subject any farther. Every one 

 in the present day has some knowledge of Galvanism and Voltaism ; every 

 one has witnessed some of those curious and astonishing effects which the 

 Voltaic fluid is capable of operating on the muscles of an animal for many 

 hours after death : and it only remains to be added, that since the discovery 

 of this extraordinary power, oxygene has in its turn fallen a sacrifice to the 

 Voltaic fluid, and this last has been contemplated by numerous physiolo- 

 gists as constituting the principle of life ; as a fluid received into the animal 

 system from without, and stimulating its different organs into vital action. 



The identity," says Dr. V^ilson Philip, " of Galvanic electricity and 

 nervous influence is established by these experiments." 



The result of the whole appears to be, that neither physiology nor che- 

 mistry, with all the accuracy and assiduity with which these sciences have 

 been pursued of late years, has been able to arrest or develope the fugitive 

 principle of life. They have unfolded to us the means by which life, per- 

 haps, is produced and maintained in the animal frame, but they have 

 given us no information as to the thing itself : we behold the instrument 

 before us, and see something of the fingers that play upon it, bift we know 

 nothing whatever of the mysterious essence that dwells in the vital tubes, 

 and constitutes the vital harmony. 



It seems to be on this account, chiefly, that the existence of such a prin- 

 ciple as a substantive essence has been of late years denied by MM. Dumas, 

 Bichat^ Richerand, Magendie, and, indeed, most of the physiologists of 

 France ; whose hypotliesis has been caught up and pretty widely circulated 

 in our own country, as though nothing in natural science can be a fair doc- 

 trine of belief, unless its subject be matter of clear developement and ex- 

 planation. But this uncalled for skepticism has involved these philosophers 

 m a dilemma from which it seems impossible for them to extricate them- 

 selves, and which we shall have occasion to notice more fully hereafter : I 

 mean the existence of powers and faculties without an entity or substantial 

 base to which they belong, and from which they originate. They allow 

 themselves to employ the term, and cannot, indeed, do without it : but after 

 all they mean nothing by it. " No one in the present day," says M. Rich- 

 erand, " contests the existence of a pkinciple of life, which subjects 

 the beings who enjoy it to an order of laws different from those which are 

 obeyed by inanimate beings ; by means of which, among its principal cha- 

 racteristics, the bodies which it animates are withdrawn from the absolute 

 government of chemical afl[inities, and are capable of maintaining their 

 temperature at a near degree of equaUty, whatever be that of the surround- 

 ing atmosphere. Its essence is not designed to preserve the aggregation 

 of constituent molecules, but to collect other molecules which, by assimi- 

 lating themselves to the organs that it vivifies, may replace those which 

 daily losses carry off, and which are employed in repairing and augmenting 

 them."* Yet, when we come to examine into the subject more closely, 



♦ "Peraonne aujourd'hui ne conteste 1'existence d'un principe de vfE qui isoumet 

 l€8 etres qui en jouissent a un ordre de lois diffeteutes de celles auxquelles obeissent les 

 etres inanimes, force a laquelle on pourroit assignee, eomme principaux characteres, de sous- 

 traire les corps qu'ELLE anime, a I'empire absolu des aflSnites chiraiques, auxquelles ils 



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