proposed to blend into one, calling it neurility. These are mere names, serving as a kind of shorthand; but to those who believe that there is something real in it, this something is not very far from the blas of Van Helmont. Vulcans, hidden in the muscle or the nerve, are here detected by attraction, there by the production and the propagation of the nervous influx; that is to say, by phenomena of which we as yet know no analogues in the physical world, but of which we cannot say that they do not exist.
X. Bichat and G. Cuvier: Vital and Physical Properties Antagonistic.—The archeus and the blas of Van Helmont were but a first rough outline of vital properties. Xavier Bichat, the founder of general anatomy, wearied of all these incorporeal entities, of these unsubstantial principles with which biology was encumbered, undertook to get rid of them by the methods of the physicist and the chemist. The physics and the chemistry of his day referred phenomenal manifestations to the properties of matter, gravity, capillarity, magnetism, etc. Bichat did the same. He referred vital manifestations to the properties of living tissues, if not, indeed, of living matter. Of these properties as yet but very few were known: the irritability described by Glisson, which is the excitability of current physiology; and the irritability of Haller, which is nothing but muscular contractility. Others had to be discovered.
There is no need to recall the mistake made by Bichat and followed by most scientific men of his time, such as Cuvier in France, and J. Müller in Germany, for the story has been told by Claude Bernard. His mistake was in considering the vital properties not only as distinct from physical properties
