It is remarkable that these ideas, so excessively and exaggeratedly spiritualistic, should have been brought forward by a chemist and a physician, while ideas completely opposed to these were admitted by philosophers like Descartes and Leibniz, who were decided believers in the spirituality of the soul. Stahl had been Professor of Medicine at the University of Halle, physician to the Duke of Saxe-Weimar, and later to the King of Prussia. He left an important medical and chemical work, both theoretical and practical. He is the author of the celebrated theory of phlogiston, which held its ground in chemistry up to the time of Lavoisier. He died about 1734. Animism survived him for some time, maintained by the zeal of a few faithful disciples. But after the witty mockery of Bordeu,[1] in 1742, it began to decay. We must, however, point out that an attempt to revive this theory was made in 1878 by a well-known doctor of the last generation, E. Chauffard. While preserving the essential features of the theory, this learned physician proposed to bring it into harmony with modern science, and to free it from all the reproaches which had been levelled at it. [1] In a thesis presented in 1742 at Montpellier, Bordeu, then only twenty years of age, made game of the tasks imposed by animists on the Soul, “which has to moisten the lips when required;” or, “whose anger produces the symptoms of certain diseases;” or again, “which is prevented by the consequences of original sin from guiding and directing the body.” _The Animism of E. Chauffard._—These reproaches were numerous. The most serious is of a philosophic nature. It rises from the difficulty of conceiving a direct and immediate action of the soul, considered as a spiritual principle, upon the matter of the body. There is such an abyss—hewn by the philosophic mind itself—between soul and body, that it is impossible to imagine any relation between them. We can only get a glimpse of how the soul might become an instrument of action.