The Seat of the Vital Principle.—Meanwhile, another question was asked with reference to this vital principle. It was a question of ascertaining its seat: or, in other words, of finding its place in the organism. Is it spread throughout the organism, or is it situated in some particular spot from which it acts upon every part of the body? Van Helmont, a celebrated scientist at the end of the sixteenth century, who was both physician and alchemist, gave the first and rather quaint solution of this difficulty. The vital principle, according to him, was situated in the stomach, or rather in the opening of the pylorus. It was the concierge, so to speak, of the stomach. The Hebrew idea was more reasonable. The life was connected with the blood, and was circulated with it by means of all the veins of the organism. It escaped from a wound at the same time as the liquid blood. It is clear that in this belief we see why the Jews were forbidden to eat meat which had not been bled.
The Vital Knot.—In 1748 a doctor named Lorry found that a very small wound in a certain region of the spinal marrow brought on sudden death. The position of this remarkable point was ascertained in 1812 by Legallois, and more accurately still by Flourens in 1827. It is situated in the rachidian bulb, at the level of the junction of the neck and the head; or more precisely, on the floor of the fourth ventricle, near the origin of the eighth pair of cranial nerves. This is what was called the vital knot. Upon the integrity of this spot, which is no bigger than the head of a pin, depends the life of the animal. Those who believed in a localisation of the vital principle thought that they had found the seat desired; but for that to be so the destruction of this
