THE

MECHANISM OF VITAL ACTIONS.*

THE appearance of Professor Draper's ingenious and original treatise on "Physiology" must call the attention of a large class of readers to those higher questions of the science which are freely discussed in its pages. The scientific and literary character of the work has been made the subject of special notice in various other quarters. It is agreed that Professor Draper has given us a book that is full of interest, containing many striking views and novel experimental illustrations. Its faults spring out of its merits, and are such as belong to most works of science written by men of lively imagination. We make our sincere acknowledgments

* Published July, 1857.

1. Human Physiology, Statical and Dynamical; or the Conditions and Course of the Life of Man. By John William Draper, M. D., LL. D., Professor of Chemistry and Physiology in the University of New York. New York: Harper & Brothers. 1856. 8vo. Pp. 649.

2. The Mutual Relations of the Vital and Physical Forces. By William B. Carpenter, M. D., Examiner in Physiology and Comparative Anatomy in the University of London. From the "Philosophical Transactions," Part II., for 1850. London. 1850. 4to. Pp. 37.

3. The Correlation of Physical Forces. By W. R. Grove, M. A., F. R. S., Barrister-at-Law. Second edition. London. 1850. 8vo. Pp. 119.

4. Caloric; its Mechanical, Chemical, and Vital Agencies in the Phenomena of Nature. By Samuel L. Metcalfe, M. D., of Transylvania University. London. 1843. 2 vols. 8vo. Pp. 1,100.

to the author for the fresh contributions he has furnished to our knowledge of the laws of life, and the new impulse he has imparted to the study of its mysteries.

We have prefixed to this paper the titles of two essays, published within the last few years, and also of a ponderous volume which saw the light before either of them, and has been, or seems to have been, less read than either. Mr. Grove's essay has excited great attention in England, and received the honors of translation into the French language. Dr. Carpenter's paper, published in the "Philosophical Transactions," extended the generalizations of Mr. Grove into the domain of Physiology. Both are brief, and are therefore read. Dr. Metcalfe forgot the motto which he must have often seen quoted from D'Alembert: "The author kills himself in spinning out what the reader kills himself in cutting short." Consequently his book has been shelved, in spite of its originality and learning. But we must do our countryman the justice to say that, if there is anything in the physical theory of vital actions which has found advocates in Mr. Newport and Dr. Carpenter, and which Professor Draper has so forcibly illustrated, Dr. Metcalfe has anticipated them all in maintaining that caloric "is alone, of every form of being, quick or dead, the active principle"; the same doctrine, modernized, which, in another form, was taught by Hippocrates. And we must be permitted to express our astonishment that a work of such pretensions, published in London, should be ignored by any English writer of authority, while he is repeating and developing its leading ideas, long since given to the world.

We do not propose to make a critical examination of any of these publications. We only avail ourselves of them for

the purpose of opening one of the questions which all of them suggest or discuss. This is the relation existing between the physical agencies of general nature and the peculiar manifestations of living beings. The interest of physiologists

was especially called to this subject by the well-known lectures of Professor Matteucci, delivered in the University of Pisa, by appointment of the Tuscan Government, in 1844. A translation of these lectures was introduced to the English public under the auspices of Dr. Pereira and Professor Faraday. From that time, the questions involved in the comparison of living and lifeless nature have attracted more and more attention, until they have become, in a measure, blended with popular studies. We propose to select one subdivision of this vast subject for such discussion as may not be unfitted for the eye of the unprofessional student of nature.

If the reader of this paper live another complete year, his self-conscious principle will have migrated from its present tenement to another, the raw materials, even, of which are not as yet put together. A portion of that body of his which is to be will ripen in the corn of the next harvest. Another portion of his future person he will purchase, or others will purchase for him, headed up in the form of certain barrels of potatoes. A third fraction is yet to be gathered in a Southern rice-field. The limbs with which he is then to walk will be clad with flesh borrowed from the tenants of many stalls and pastures, now unconscious of their doom. The very organs of speech with which he is to talk so wisely, or plead so eloquently, or preach so effectively, must first serve his humbler brethren to bleat, to bellow, and for all the varied utterances of bristled or feathered barn-yard life.

His bones themselves are, to a great extent, in posse, and not in esse. A bag of phosphate of lime which he has ordered from Professor Mapes, for his grounds, contains a large part of what is to be his next year's skeleton. And, more than all this, as by far the greater part of his body is nothing, after all, but water, the main substance of his scattered members is to be looked for in the reservoir, in the running streams, at the bottom of the well, in the clouds that float over his head, or diffused among them all.

For a certain period, then, the permanent human being is to use the temporary fabric made up of these shifting materials. So long as they are held together in human shape, they manifest certain properties which fit them for the use of a self-conscious and self-determining existence. But it is as absurd to suppose any identification of this existence with the materials which it puts on and off, as to suppose the hand identified with the glove it wears, or the sponge with the various fluids which may in succession fill its pores. Our individual being is in no sense approximated to a potato by living on that esculent for a few months; and if we study the potato while it forms a part of our bodies under the name of brain or muscle, we shall learn no more of the true nature of our self-determining consciousness than if we studied the same tuber in the hill where it grew.

These forms of nutritive matter that pass through our systems in a continual round may be observed, weighed, tested, analyzed, tortured in a thousand ways, without our touching for a moment the higher problem of our human existence. Sooner or later, according to the perfection of our methods and instruments, we bring hard up against a deaf, dumb, blind fact. The microscope reaches a granule,

and there it stops. Chemistry finds a few bodies which it can not decompose, and plays with them as with so many dominos, counting and matching equivalents as our old friends of the Café Procope used to count and match the spots on their humbler playthings. But why C, O,, H., have such a tendency to come together, and why, when they have come together, a fluid ounce of the resulting compound will make the small philosopher as great as a king for an hour or two, and give him the usual headache which crowns entail upon their wearers, the next morning, is not written in the pages of Lehmann, nor treasured in the archives of Poggendorf. Experimental physiology teaches how to stop the wheels of the living machinery, and sometimes how to start them when their action is checked; but no observation from the outside ever did or ever will approach the mystery of that most intense of all realities-our relations, as responsible agents, to right and wrong. It will never answer, by aid of microscope, or balance, or scalpel, that ever-recurring question

"Whence this pleasing hope, this fond desire,

This longing after immortality?"

The study of physical and physiological phenomena has been thought to lead to what is called materialism, or something worse. In spite of Galen's half-Christian religious eloquence-in spite of Haller's defense of the faith, and of Boerhaave's apostolic piety-we can not forget the old saying that where there are three physicians there are two atheists. It would be almost as fair to say that where there are three bank-clerks there are two rogues. Unquestionably, the handling of large sums of money betrays into dis