‘The doctrine, that every thing is provided with its own properties, was from time to time checked by metaphysicians and scholastic divines; but by degrees it gained ground, and the maxim that matter is inert was entirely refuted. Natural philosophers discovered corporeal properties, the laws of attraction and repulsion, of chemical affinity, of fermentation, and even of organization. They considered the phenomena of vegetables as the production of material qualities—as properties of matter. Glisson attributed to matter a particular activity, and to the animal fibre a specific irritability. De Gorter acknowledged in vegetable life something more than pure mechanism. Winter and Zups proved that the phenomena of vegetable life ought to be ascribed only to irritability. Of this, several phenomena of flowers and leaves indicate a great degree. The hop and French-bean twine round rods which are planted near them. The tendrils of vines curl round poles or the branches of neighbouring trees. The ivy climbs the oak, and adheres to its sides, &c. Now it would be absurd to pretend that the organization of animals is entirely destitute of properties: therefore Frederick Hoffman took it for the basis of his system, that the human body, like all other bodies, is endowed with material properties.’ Page 56. ‘Here be truths,’ but dashed and brewed with lies’ or doubtful points. Yet they pass all together without discrimination or selection. There is a simplicity in many of the propositions amounting to a sort of _bonhomie_. There is an over-measure of candour and plainness. A man who gravely informs you, as an important philosophical discovery, that ‘the tendrils of vines curl round poles,’ and that ‘the human body is endowed with material properties,’ may escape without the imputation of intending to delude the unwary. But these kind of innocent pretences are like shoeing-horns to draw on the hardest consequences. By the serious offer of this meat for babes, you are prepared to swallow a horse-drench of parboiled paradoxes. You are thrown off your guard into a state of good-natured surprise, by the utter want of all meaning; and our craniologist catches his wondering disciples in a trap of truisms. Instances might be multiplied from this part of the work, where the writer is occupied in getting up the plot, and lulling asleep any suspicion, or feeling of petulance in the mind of the public. Just after, he says—