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Thus the seeds of many plants retain their vital power for incalculable 
years, only requiring the agents of heat, moisture, and air, to put this pimci- 
pal into action, and make it self-evident to our senses. 
Our ideas of life have been so much connected with organic bodies, and 
principally those endowed with visible action, that it requires a new bend to 
the mind, to make it conceive that these circumstances can be separable. 
An organ is a peculiar construction of parts to answer some purpose, the 
operation of which may depend upon such a configuration, but mere organi¬ 
zation can do nothing, even in mechanics it must still have something corre¬ 
sponding to the living principle, some power. 
Brown, the Reformer of Medicine, calls life a forced state, and therefore 
makes life to consist of action, whereas sometimes it is quiescent, but sus¬ 
ceptible of action from adapted stimuli, and of consequent alterations, both 
in the organization and modes of action. 
Lamark entertains an opinion somewhat similar. 
“ Jusqu’au moment de la germination , toutes les parties dune semence qui se 
trouve separee de la plante-mere qui la produite, sont en quelque sorte dans 
un repos complet: les sues qu’elle renferme y sont en quantite mediocre, 
with conferva and other aquatic plants. This worm is divided towards its head into two pretty large 
trunks, which appear like two wheels or stars, from the number of small, extremely sharp, and short 
branches that are attached to their circumference. These really appeared to Lewenhoeck to be wheels 
of a rare mechanism, and every one would judge the same, on seeing the creature put them in motion. 
But a more exact observation at length convinced me that they are not wheels, but composed of a 
quantity of small moveable arms, formed like pointed cones, and planted all round the two trunks. 
It lets fall these moveable arms or rays successively, and afterwards raises one after the other with so 
much celerity, that the eye fancies they are turning round like the spokes of a coach wheel, or rather, 
like the branches of a wheeled fire-work. It never moves these two wheels, except when it swims 
or wishes to eat, and these two states are invariably the shortest of its life. In swimming, it strikes 
the water with these arms or branches with great celerity, rests itself at different periods, and thus 
transports itself from one place to another. When it eats, it, on the contrary, fixes its tail in some 
substance, and afterwards turns its two wheels, giving such a motion to the water, that it directs the 
course of it towards its head, so that it presents to its mouth all the small corpuscles with which it is 
filled. 
The Wheel-Polypus loses, like the moss, when dried, all appearance of life, but recovers the same 
when immersed in water. I have left it, says Fontana, by way of experiment, in a very dry soil, and 
exposed it, during the summer, to the whole heat of the sun, for the space of two years and an half. 
I afterwards returned it again into water, where at the end of two hours, it recovered life and mo¬ 
tion. I put one of them on a piece of glass, which I exposed, during a whole summer, to the noon¬ 
day sun ; it there became so dry, that it was like a piece of hardened glue. A few drops of water did 
not, however, fail to restore its motion and life. 
Thus the microscopical eels that are found dry and withered in smutty wheat, recover motion and 
life as soon as they are wetted with a little water, and again become lifeless and dry, whenever they 
are no longer moistened. I have repeatedly assured myself of this with an extreme pleasure. 
