_Decentralization of the Vital Principle._—The result is the same in the higher vertebrates, only the experiment is much more difficult. At the Physiological Congress of Turin in 1901, Locke showed the heart of a hare, extracted from the body of the animal, and beating for hours as energetically and as regularly as if it were in its place. He suspended it in the air of a room at the normal temperature, the sole condition being that it was irrigated with a liquid composed of certain constituents. The animal had been dead some time. More recently Kuliabko has shown in the same way the heart of a man still beating, although the man had been dead some eighteen hours. The same experiment is repeated in any physiological laboratory, in a much easier manner, with the heart of a tortoise. This organ, extracted from the body, fitted up with rubber tubes to represent its arteries and veins, and filled with the defibrinated blood of a horse or an ox taken from the slaughter-house, works for hours and days pumping the liquid blood into its rubber aorta, just as if it were pumping it into the living aorta. But it is unnecessary to multiply examples. Every organ can be made to live for a longer or shorter period even though removed from its natural position; muscles, nerves, glands, and even the brain itself. Each organ, each tissue therefore enjoys an independent existence; it lives and works for itself. No doubt it shares in the activity of the whole, but it may be separated therefrom without being thereby placed in the category of dead substances. For each aliquot part of the organism there is a partial life and a partial death. This decentralization of the vital activity is finally extended in complex beings from the organs to the tissues, and from the tissues to the anatomical elements—the cells. The idea of decentralization has given birth to the second form of vitalism, a softened down and weakened form—namely, pluri-vitalism, or the theory of vital properties. § 2. THE THEORY OF VITAL PROPERTIES. The advocates of the theory of vital properties have cut up into fragments the monistic and indivisible guiding principle of Bordeu and Barthez. They have given it new currency—pluri-vitalism. This theory maintains the existence of spiritual powers of a lower order, which control phenomena more intimately than the vital principle did. These powers, less lofty in their dignity than the rational soul of the animists, or the soul of secondary majesty of the unitarian vitalists, are eventually incorporated in the living matter of which they will then be no longer more than the properties. Brought into closer connection therefore with the sensible world, they will be more in harmony with the spirit of research and with scientific progress.