Instinct and reason: deduced from electro-biology / By Alfred Smee.

  • Alfred Smee
Date:
1850
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Instinct and reason: deduced from electro-biology / By Alfred Smee. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    and then ceases to live. The dead parts decay,, and the elements of which they are composed revert to their original state, to be used again for some other purpose. My daisy, however, is but taken as an illustration of the great class of plants, some of which, with noble trunk, tower upwards, defy the tempest, and stretch their stately limbs to afford shelter to the wearied traveller or scorched beast. Other plants are, again, so diminutive (as some of the fungi), that they are enabled to live within the cells of other plants, and their parts are scarcely visible under the highest powers of modern microscopes. 5. When, however, wre turn to the stone, we find that it began a stone, it continues a stone, and a stone it will remain, for ages and ages, unless some force acts upon it, and either crushes it into powder, or separates it into its component parts. This stone is an example of a large class of bodies, which are called lifeless things, and which exhibit neither affections nor passions. 6. The circumstances possessed in common by man, the dog, and the daisy, cause them to have the appellation of organic bodies, or bodies which have life, in contradistinction to stones, which are called inorganic, or lifeless bodies : and we have to study the relation of life to matter, and of mind to life. 7. To consider the qualities of a lifeless thing, we may perhaps substitute a piece of ice for the stone before mentioned. Now, chemistry teaches us that ice is a compound of oxygen and hydro¬ gen—in fact, an oxide of hydrogen,—the two elements being held together by the force of attraction. No change is taking place between these elements, but it possesses its individual charac¬ teristic by virtue of that attraction. As long as that attraction exists, it is still oxide of hydrogen ; but a destruction of that attraction, or a supervention of a new one, would cause it to be b 2
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