ON LIFE AND ORGANIZATION. 
89 
ject to the physical laws operating on substances that are not 
organized. An inward motion takes place within their substance, 
and their molecules have a greater tendency to become separated 
from one another as their decomposition is advanced. 
Before putrefaction can come on in an animal body, it must be 
entirely deprived of life : thus we may say, that life is a continual 
struggle against the laws of physics and chemistry. And it appears 
rather singular, at first, that death should furnish a just idea of life, 
did we not know that it is by comparing that we are enabled to 
distinguish, to judge, and to arrive at knowledge. 
Life and putrefaction are, therefore, two contradictory ideas. The 
phenomena of putrefaction resulting from a series of peculiar attrac- 
tions are modified in various ways, according to the nature of the 
animal substances which are subjected to it, to the media in which 
it takes place, to the different degrees of moisture and temperature, 
and even according to its different periods. The bones are the last 
part of the organized machine that become altered. In time, too, 
they become dried by the slow combustion of their fibrous part, 
and by the evaporation of their medullary juices. At last, reduced 
to an earthy skeleton, they crumble into dust ; and our imagination 
may, as Hamlet says, trace the dust of Alexander, till we find 
it stopping a bung-hole. 
“ When the body of an animal is scattered in this manner to all 
the winds of heaven — dissipated through the air and the waters, 
and over the earth, until not an atom of it can be identified or 
even known, we must not suppose that there is one atom of 
it lost, or for one instant, amid all its changes, hidden from the 
eye of Omniscience ; for we may be well assured, that, if it were 
the pleasure of the will of Him who made it, and who directed it, 
to say, ‘ Return !’ it would return, and retrace all the steps of its 
progress*.” 
Among the various subjects which this view of creation — on the 
origin both of matter and of every kind of action which matter 
displays— brings to our consideration, is the resurrection of the 
body ; but it is one into the particulars of which we cannot at 
present enter. We know, when the living action of the body has 
ceased, that the substantive matter of which it is composed is given 
up to the common laws of inorganic matter ; but to know this, and 
to know the death of all animal life, or even all vegetable life, are 
very different matters. This is one of the dark pages of the book 
of nature. 
Life, be it in animal or plant, is not organization, or the result 
of organization. The animal or the plant is not first made perfect 
Mudie. 
