is so exclusively a feature of the living being as it appears, and if many brute bodies do not present something analogous to it. We may answer in no uncertain tones.
Bichat was wrong when he contrasted in this respect brute bodies with living bodies. Vital properties, he said, are temporary; it is their nature to be exhausted; in time they are used up in the same body. Physical properties, on the contrary, are eternal. Brute bodies have neither a beginning nor an inevitable end, neither age, nor evolution; they remain as immutable as death, of which they are the image.
Mobility and Mutability of the Sidereal World.—This is not true, in the first place, of the sidereal bodies. The ancients held the sidereal world to be immutable and incorruptible. The doctrine of the incorruptibility of the heavens prevailed up to the seventeenth century. The observers who at that epoch directed towards the heavens the first telescope, which Galileo had just invented, were struck with astonishment at discovering a change in that celestial firmament which they had hitherto believed incorruptible, and at perceiving a new star that appeared in the constellation Ophiuchus. Such changes no longer surprise us. The cosmogonic system of Laplace has become familiar to all cultivated minds, and every one is accustomed to the idea of the continual mobility and evolution of the celestial world. "The stars have not always existed," writes M. Faye; "they have had a period of formation; they will likewise have a period of decline, followed by final extinction."
Thus all the bodies of inanimate nature are not
