instead of composing a metaphysical degree of beings, is a physical property, common to all matter. CHAPTER II. OR [BH]REPRODUCTION IN GENERAL. [BH] This word is used by the author in an enlarged sense of propagation, for as generation applies to animated beings, so by this he includes the vegetable as well as animal system. We shall now make a more minute inspection into this common property of animal and vegetable nature; this power of producing its resemblance; this chain of successive individuals, which constitutes the real existence of the species; and without attaching ourselves to the generation of man, or to that of any particular kind of animal, let us inspect the phenomenas of reproduction in general, let us collect facts, and enumerate the different methods nature makes use of to renew organized beings. The first, and as we think the most simple method, is, to collect in one body an infinite number of resembling organic bodies, and so to compose its substance, that there is not a part of it which does not contain a germ of the same species, and which consequently of itself might become a whole, resembling that of which it constitutes a part. This preparation seems to suppose a prodigious waste, and to carry with it profusion; yet it is a very common munificence of nature, and which manifests itself even in the most common and inferior kinds, such as worms, polypuses, elms, willows, gooseberry-trees, and many other plants and insects, each part of which contains a whole, and by the single effect of expansion alone may become a plant, or an insect. By considering organized beings in this point of view, an individual is a whole, uniformly organized in all its parts; a compound of an infinity of resembling figures and similar parts, an assemblage of germs, or small individuals of the same kind, which can expand in the same mode according to circumstances, and form new bodies, composed like those from whence they proceed. By examining this idea thoroughly, we shall discover a connection between animals, vegetables, and minerals, which we could not expect. Salts, and some other minerals, are composed of parts resembling each other, and to all that composes them; a grain of salt is a cube, composed of an infinity of smaller cubes, which we may easily perceive by a microscope; these are also composed of other cubes still smaller, as may be perceived with a better microscope; and we cannot doubt, but that the primitive and constituting particles of this salt are likewise cubes so exceedingly minute as to escape our sight, and our imagination. Animals and plants which can multiply by all their parts, are organized bodies, of which the primitive and constituting parts are also organic and similar, of which we discern the aggregate quantity, but cannot perceive the primitive parts only by reason and analogy.