they, as it were, revive from their sleep, and renew again their reproductive properties: can we wonder if, in the great scheme of nature, existences new to mankind should make their appearance? When the New Zealander saw the surface of his ground producing to him unknown plants, and the skins of his children generating peculiar eruptions, and each propagating its kind, would he look, think you, to the wood or the stones, the air or the water,--for the solution of the {21} mystery? No, he would naturally say these people brought the _seeds_ with them. From the property of reproduction possessed by these forms of matter, we infer the value of the proposition. * * * * * {22} CHAPTER II. THE NUMBER AND VALUE OF FACTS TO SUPPORT THE PROPOSITION. -------- SECTION I. ON REPRODUCTION. It is inferred that the proposition, "_the matter which operates in the production of Epidemic, Endemic, and Infectious Diseases, possesses the property of vitality_," we proceed now to the enumeration of those facts which further elucidate this subject. The facts must necessarily be such as illustrate the identity of properties in the imaginary germs, that are known to exist in demonstrable germs: we take therefore the law of reproduction to be to life, what the law of attraction is to gravitation.[6] {23} But further; do those matters which engender disease furnish to our minds the properties inseparable from life in the abstract? Though the faculty of reproduction is essentially an evidence that the thing which reproduces its kind must be a living body, yet it is only a property or power of living beings and is not itself life, it therefore is necessary to establish the fact that the _materies morbi_ not only has the power of reproduction, but also those properties which in the abstract will prove as far as demonstration can go, that it has the essential properties common to all living bodies. I must again quote from Coleridge, he says: "By life I every where mean the true idea of life, or that most general form under which life manifests itself to us, which includes all its other forms. This I have stated to be the _tendency to individuation_ and the degrees or intensities of life, to consist in the progressive realization of this tendency. The {24} power which is acknowledged to exist wherever the realization is found, must subsist wherever the tendency is manifested. The power which comes forth and stirs abroad in the bird, must be latent in the egg."