Page:Philosophical Transactions - Volume 095.djvu/24

12 and they will be regenerated without apparent inconvenience to the individual: the whole animal is equally sensible, equally irritable, equally alive: its procreation is gemmiferous. Every part is pervaded by the nutritious juices, every part is acted upon by the respiratory influence, every part is equally capable of motion, and of altering its figure in all directions, whilst neither blood-vessels, nerves, nor muscular fibres, are discoverable by any of the modes of investigation hitherto instituted.

From this abstract animal (if such a term may be admitted) up to the human frame, the variety of accessory parts, and of organs by which a complicated machinery is operated, exhibit infinite marks of design, and of accommodations to the purposes which fix the order of nature.

In the more complicated animals, there are parts adapted for trivial conveniences, much of their materials not being alive, and the entire offices of some liable to be dispensed with. The water transfused throughout the intersticial spaces of the animal fabric, the combinations with lime in bones, shells, and teeth; the horns, hoofs, spines, hairs, feathers, and cuticular coverings, are all of them, or the principal parts of their substance, extra-vascular, insensible, and unalterable by the animal functions after they are completed. I have formed an opinion, grounded on extensive observation, that many more parts of animal bodies may be considered as inanimate substances; even the reticular membrane itself seems to be of this class, and tendons, which may be the condensed state of it; but these particulars are foreign to the present occasion.

The deduction now to be made, and applied to the history of muscular motion, is, that animated matter may be connected with inanimate; this is exemplified in the adhesions of the