plays. Animal mind is excitable by various stimuli, which act upon the digesting organs of its body; as the human mind can be both stimulated and stupified by the inebriating liquids. In some animals, the principle of life continues even when in the stomach of another, resisting its dissolving actions there, and preserving itself in full vigour, though remaining in this bodily grave.

It is a curious fact, that the living principle of one animal can, by means of the galvanic agency in its body, act upon that of another.§ It is still more curious, that the animal principle of life can retain its energy, though buried for many centuries by the convulsions of nature amid its rocks and fossils, as if from the diluvian times; and yet can revive into activity on being drawn from its sepulchral cavern into air and light again. The movements that

Thus game cocks are made to take brandy, balls of food with cayenne and other stimulants, a short time before their appointed contest, to make them more fierce and fearless in it.

We know that beer intoxicates into stupidity; but when into the mouth of one thus stupified, three spoonfuls of brandy were introduced, and soon after a few more by mistake, the intoxication went off, and the man seemed to have awakened from a long and painful dream. Quart. Journ. Science, No. 12, p. 435.

Dr. Trumpy stated, that in July 1824, a woman had evacuated from her stomach a lunex rufus above three inches long, and two and a half round, which had grown up there from an embryo state, in which it had entered with some water she had drank. Bull. Un. 1829, v. 4, p. 47... When a heifer, that had been three months ill from some unknown cause, was opened, an adder was found within its larynx, that had but recently died. "A girl, of eighteen, after being much convulsed, dis charged a live frog, and, three days after, a dead one. She had been accustomed to drink water from ponds." Preston Chron. 1828.

§ Aldini, about thirty years ago, ascertained that metals were not absolutely necessary for the production of the galvanic fluid; but that it is excited, or collected in the organs of the animal body, and here acts as if the main cause or instrument of muscular motion. He excited muscular contractions by applying the nerves to the muscles of a prepared frog; and gave motion to the limbs of a small cold-blooded animal, by applying to it the galvanic energy of an aniinal with warm blood.

Professor Eaton, of New-York, stated that the diluvial deposits through which the Erie Canal was made, contained ridges of hard com pact gravel. On cutting through one of these near Rome village, sixteen miles west of Utica, the workmen found several hundred of LIVE mollus cous animals. They were chiefly of the mya cariosa and mya purpurea. The workmen took the animals, fried, and eat them. He adds, I was assured that they were taken alive forty-two feet deep in the deposit, Several of the shells are now before me. The deposit is diluvial. These animals must have been there from the time of the deluge; for the earth in which they were is too compact for them to have been produced by a succession of generations. These fresh-water clans of 3,000 years old precisely resemble the same species which now inhabit the fresh waters

have been noticed in the molecules, or atomical particles of bodies, in infusions, or other solutions and decombinations of them, have been referred to the action of a living principle within them. When they are organized seeds, it is not impossible, as these have this vital principle within them, that it may agitate its material envelope; but the motions of any other particles which are not organized bodies have been deemed, by calmer judgment and more discriminating observation, to be the mere effect of physical causation, The action of light, electricity, the galvanic fluid, heat, or magnetism, may each produce occasional phenomena of this description.t

of that district. Therefore the lives of these animals have been greatly prolonged by their exclusion from air and light for more than 3,000 years." Dr. Silliman's Am. Journal, No. 15, p. 249.

• Mr. Howard examined with a microscope the pollen of the hazeltree (corylus avellana.) A clear drop of distilled water being put on the glass, the grains imbibed it with the avidity of a sponge, and distended, but without any further motion. On other pollen, a drop of brandy instead of water, was applied. "The grains expand as in the water; but in the meantime are put into rapid motion, each grain darting from side to side with the vivacity of a swarm of gnats in the air. As they approach to complete expansion, the motion dies away; and one after another sinks to the bottom. Presently the liquid begins to be obscured, and, in a few minutes, the grains are mostly dispersed and decomposed." Trans. Linn. Soc. v. 6. Samouelle, Entom. 336.

This phenomena looks like the principle of life suddenly excited into unnatural agitation, and at last separating itself from its material organization. In some human deaths, the body is agitated by convulsive starts and spasms, before the spirit of its life can free itself from its nervous abode. I once saw a distressing instance of this, for the last fifteen minutes. It exactly resembled the action of a soul struggling to extricate itself.

† M. Gaillon had misled himself on this subject, and fancied that these particles could give birth to animalcule; and these, in their turn, reproduce a vegetable. Mr. Edwards has also suffered himself to be drawn to favour such erroneous theories, and thereby to misinterpret his own experiments. The editor of the Bull. Univ. very justly says, "the exactitude of such opinions cannot be too rigorously proved.". Schulz also imagined, from the movements he saw, that all the saps of plants and the blood of animals were composed of living globules, and that all the bodies of plants and animals were but the aggregations of an infinity of these living molecules; that is, that every man, instead of being, as we all feel ourselves to be, a one individual self-a one undivided personality-is in reality a million of distinct living things: that no man is a single man, but millions of other kinds of beings inclosed in our skin, and making up all together that living creature which we call ourself. Such absurdities ought to be felt to be so, the moment they occur. They are destroyed by the exact experiment and correct observer. Rudolphe and Meyer affirm, that these imagined spontaneous movements are pure optical illusions. Schulz examined his fluids in the full sun; and found that the effects of the light on the particles would produce the motions deemed spontaneous,

There seem to be two distinct orders of existences in the world, unitable at all times with each other, but equally separable from each other; and always maintaining a clear distinction, and a difference which is never lost nor confounded. These grand divisions of what manifestly exist, may be called the material and the immaterial. All that is material is a combination of elementary particles or atoms, always combinable, existing every where in combination, yet always separating from each other, as the decombining agencies of nature cause them to be parted. Every mate rial thing is a compound, and is divisible or separable into the material atoms of which it is composed. By whatever name we may denominate these more elementary constitu ents, whether we call them corpuscules, particles, atoms, or molecules, all that we see, feel, smell, or taste, is of this character, an assemblage of smaller material particles into a palpable or visible substance. The subtlest fluids are of this kind, as well as the most solid masses; the gas as well as the rock; though the one are dense, and the other lighter combinations of original elements. Even the finest fluids or material substances that we know, the luminous, caloric, and electrical ones, are still but unions of particles, however minute we may deem them. Such is matter-always an aggregation of separable parts and particles. No material thing is a oneness or a whole, except such a temporary singularity, as the temporary union of its particles into a particular figure, for the time of their mutual cohesion, happens to occasion. This character, matter never loses in

Bull. Un. 1830, p. 42. The true fact seems to be, as Mr. Brown has stated, that the extremely fine particles of a solid body, whether organic or inorganic, when suspended in pure water, or other fluid, show motions which he could not account for. From their irregularity and apparent independence of each other, they resemble, to a remarkable degree, the less rapid movements of some of the most simple infusory animals. The smallest were nearly spherical, and in diameter from one twenty-thousandth to one thirty-thousandth of an inch. Other larger particles exhibited, in the same circumstances, analogous motions. He found them also in the particles of sulphur, resin, and wax.

Bull. Un.

1828, p. 221.. Thus Mr. Brown destroyed the fond opinion, that the molecules of organic bodies were living globules, by showing that inorganic bodies and minerals had the same movements; and his further inference was, that these arose from some physical agencies, which is the true deduction. In this light, the experiments are well worth pur suing, as they will tend to elucidate the fine operations of light, heat, electricity, and the aerial agencies on the minute particles of matter; and may lead us to the causes and means of the attraction, cohesion, dissolution and chemical changes of material substances.

any of its forms or modes of subsistence; and this distinguishes the material portion and classes of existence from all that is not so.

To what is not so-to what is not an aggregation or com bination of separable particles, we must attach, both in truth of fact, and in the correctness of our perceptions of it, some other appellation; and the simplest distinguishing denomination seems to be that of a negation of identity or similarity,the not material, the un-material, or the immaterial. Thus we have two appropriated terms that will fully suffice to distinguish the material and the not material portions of existing nature from each other; and by using these, we keep them as distinct from each other in our perceptions and memory, as they are in reality and nature.

The immaterial, or not material portion of existing nature comprises all living principles; all sorts and degrees of sensitivity and mind-the soul of man, and the ever-blessed Deity. Though all very distinct from each other, and the last infinitely so, yet they are all comprehendible under the general term of immaterial existences; because they are all, in the strictest sense of the word, of this description: neither of them are aggregations, or unions of parts or particles. Whatever either may be in its individual qualities and characterizing nature, each has the peculiar property of being a oneness, a whole, a single intirety. None of them can be divided into elementary atoms or molecules. Life cannot be cut asunder, any more than the power of feeling or that of thought. If you take off the limb of a feeling animal, though you disunite that into a separate part, you carry no feeling with it. The severed limb, once severed from that body which contains the sentient principle, has no sensitivity after the amputation. This is the great distinction of all immaterial being. It is indivisible; it is not a composition; it is undissolvable; it is always a one whole; a perfect singularity; an uncompounded thing. The term being is more properly its denomination than thing; be cause, being or living existence is also its invariable and inseparable characteristic. Life or being is the universal companion and mark of all that is immaterial. What feels, must live; what thinks, must live; the soul preeminently

Yet life, as we see in vegetables, is not necessarily united with either feeling or thought. Feeling, is life combined with sensitivity; and this combination may exist without a reasoning faculty, as in the lowest classes of animated

nature. Mind is life combined with feeling and thought; and this may subsist, as in brutes, without the human soul. Our spirit is an additional nature: it is the union of life, feeling, and thought, with its highly born and most distinguished self; and all these orders of immaterial being are realities in nature, distinguishable from each other as they are from the eternal source and Sovereign of them all, the almighty and everlasting Creator, from whom, and from whom alone, all life, feeling, thought, and spirit, have pro

ceeded.

Thus there appears to be in existing nature, so far as we at present know it, and to be there distinctly perceptible by us, FOUR classes or orders of immaterial being, which are not each other, but which are all separate essences or animated things, and which subsist manifestly apart from each other, with very distinguishing properties. The first of these is indeed so superior, that it is almost profane to associate it with the others; but, as it is the fountain of all, it may be reverentially placed at the head of all immaterial being, though with the impression of being at an infinite distance and unapproachable exaltation:

The supreme eternal Creator of all.

The human soul.

The animal mind.

The vegetable living principle.

Each of the three last is at a great distance from the other, in power and qualities, in descending scale from the human spirit to the plant.

Thus the gracious Deity, as the author and source of all that is immaterial, possesses in himself all spirit, mind, feeling, and life, and has distributed them respectively to his creatures as he has thought fit. The human spirit has also perceiving and thinking mind, sensibility, and the principle of life, but is not its divine maker. Brutes have sensations, perceptions, memory, will, comparing thought, and a deciding judgment. Though varying in degree, they have also feeling and life; but they have not the human soul, and cannot do what that does, nor be what that is. So plants have that living principle which places them in the ranks of immaterial beings; but they have not the animal sensitivity, nor a perceiving or thinking mind, nor a human spirit. They are the lowest order of immaterial being. In them, an immaterial principle is united, in its simplest state, with a material organization and substance.

They