To be born, signifies the faculty of reproduction existing or having existed in an antecedent being to that one born, and also that itself possesses equally a like power. To be born, is the first expression which must be used in speaking of the faculties or properties of living beings as independent existences, the annual formation of buds, trees, and shrubs, is a multiplication of the species; the coral {26} and various budding polypes increase by this process, indeed what is the seed of a plant, or the egg of a bird, or the ovum of mammalia, but cast off buds; in all, the new being was originally a portion of its parent, and if we examine the ovary of the vegetable, the bird, or the mammal, can we find any expression more fitting to designate the process than that of budding. To be born then, is the evidence of an act of one living being, and the commencement of a series of vital phenomena in another, but all these are subsequent to reproduction, and constitute another chain of vital acts, all tending to a similar result, the multiplication of the species.[8] Now, whether we apply the philosophical language of Coleridge, or the language of observation of Muller, in confirmation of the doctrine here inculcated, we arrive at the same point. Do we not witness in the newly formed vaccine vesicle, an increase of the specific force and principle? We certainly have acquired by the process of vaccination a manifold multiplication of power, and is there not also assimilation of new matter in {27} which this power resides? And does not every particle of this new matter contain within itself the same force and principle, as existed in that which generated it? "We revert again to potentiated length in the power of magnetism (reproduction); to surface in the power of electricity, and to the synthesis of both or potentiated depth in constructive, that is chemical affinity."[9] Some may be at a loss to conceive, at first, how irritability may be considered a property of all vegetable matter; that it does exist in some vegetables is certain, but that it does exist in all living beings is equally certain;[10] the term, however, which would appear more appropriate when that irritability does not exhibit itself in an appreciable form, is _impressibility_. Irritability, as commonly understood, is seen in its highest condition in muscular tissue; but "the irritable power and an analogon of voluntary motion first dawn on us in the vegetable world in the stamina and anthers at the period of {28} impregnation."--"The insect world is the exponent of irritability, as the vegetable is of reproduction." The property of irritability attains its acme in man, the most highly organized of all beings; and its gradations pass downwards through the whole scale of animate creation; not so reproduction, for this faculty observes the very opposite direction, for in plants a single impregnation is sufficient for the evolution of myriads of detached lives.