quite chimerical, and akin to Kepler's dreamy visions. But in a certain way it accords with contemporary ideas concerning the life of matter. It is related to them by the evolution which it implies in the materials of the terrestrial globe.
According to Preyer, primitive life existed in fire. Being igneous masses in fusion, the pyrozoa lived after their own manner; their vitality, slowly modified, assumed the form which it presents to-day. Yet, in this profound transformation their number has not varied, and the total quantity of life in the universe has remained unchanged.
Here we recognize the ideas of Buffon. These cosmozoa, these pyrozoa, have a singular resemblance to the organic molecules of "live matter" of the illustrious naturalist—distributed everywhere, indestructible, and forming living structures by their concentration.
But we must leave these scientific or philosophical theories, and come to arguments based upon facts.
It is in a spirit quite different from that of the poets, the metaphysicians, and the more or less philosophical scientists that the science of our days looks at the more or less obscure vitality of inanimate bodies. It claims that we may recognize in them, in a more or less rudimentary state, the action of the factors which intervene in the case of living beings, the manifestation of the same fundamental properties.
