It is evidently impossible to say what this vitality of the fluids is; its existence however is not less real, and the chemist who wishes to analyze the fluids, has, like the anatomist who dissects the solids, only the dead body upon which he can operate. You will observe, that when the principle of life has left the fluids, they go immediately into a state of putrefaction, and are decomposed like the solids, deprived of their vital powers. This alone prevents that internal movement, which undoubtedly enters much into the alterations of which the fluids are susceptible. Observe what takes place after a meal; ordinarily a slight increase of the pulse, the effect of the mixture of the nutritive principles with the blood, is the consequence of it. If you have made use of acrid or spicy aliments, to which you are unaccustomed, a general heat, a thousand different sensations of lassitude and heaviness, accompany digestion. Shall I speak of the various kinds of wine, and their effects, even to intoxication? Who has not a hundred times paid dearly for the pleasures of a repast by a general disorder, an universal agitation, a heat in every part during the whole time that the wine circulates with the blood? Who has not observed that one kind of wine produces one effect and another a different? The solids are then without doubt the seat of every thing we experience; but is not the cause of it in the fluids? It is the blood, which carrying with its own particles others that are foreign to it, excites all the organs, and especially the brain, because there is a particular relation between this viscus and spirituous liquors, as there is between cantharides and the bladder, and mercury and the salivary glands. That which I say is so true, that if you infuse wine into the open vein of an animal, you will produce analogous effects. The experiments made upon this subject are so well known that I have not even repeated them. I will relate a fact here which disproves what has lately been advanced upon the incorruptibility of the blood in diseases. A short time since, in examining a body at the Hôtel Dieu, with Mess. Péborde, l'Herminier, and Bourdet, we found instead of the black abdominal blood, a real grey sanies, which filled all the divisions of the splenic vein, the trunk of the vena porta, and all the hepatic branches, so that by cutting the liver in slices, we could distinguish by the flow of this sanies, all the ramifications of the vena porta from those of the vena cava, which contained ordinary blood. This body was so remarkable for its size, that I do not recollect to have ever seen one equal to it. Certainly this sanies was not the effect of death, and the blood had circulated, if not thus altered, at least very different from its natural state, and really decomposed.