The question _de Origine et Naturâ Animarum in Brutis_ was brought before the Theologians of seven Protestant Academies in the year 1635, by Daniel Sennertus Professor of Medicine at Wittemberg, of whose Institutes Sir Thomas Browne says to a student in that art, “assure yourself that when you are a perfect master of them you will seldom meet with any point in physic to which you will not be able to speak like a man.” It was the opinion of this very learned professor that what in scholastic language is called the _form_ of every perfect thing, (distinguished from _figure,—forma est naturæ bonum, figura, artis opus_) though it is not a soul, yet even in precious stones is something altogether different from the four elements, and that every soul, or living principle, is a certain quintessence; the wonderful operations in plants, and the more wonderful actions of brute creatures, far exceeding all power of the elements, had convinced him of this. But for asserting it, Freitagius the medical Professor at Groninghen attacked him fiercely as a blasphemer and a heretic. Sennertus being then an old man was more moved by this outrage than became one of his attainments and high character. So he laid the case before the Universities of Leipsic, Rostock, Basle, Marpurg, Konigsberg, Jena, Strasburg, and Altorff, and he requested their opinion upon these two propositions, whether what he had affirmed, that the souls of brute creatures had been created at first from nothing by the Deity, and were not of an elementary nature, but of something different, was blasphemous and heretical, or whether it were not an ignorant opinion of his assailant, that brute animals consisted wholly of elementary matter, both as to their body and soul? They all answered the questions more or less at large, the Leipsic Doctors saying _officii nostri duximus esse ut in timore Domini ea sub diligentem disquisitionem vocaremus._ They saw nothing irreligious in the opinion that God at the creation had formed the bodies of brutes from elementary matter, and created their souls _ex nihilo_; after which both were reproduced in the natural course of generation; these souls however were not immortal, nor so separable from the matter with which they were united, as to survive it, and exist without it, or return again into their bodies; but when the animals died, the animal soul died also. Thus the excellence of man was unimpaired, and the privilege of the human soul remained inviolate, the prerogative of man being that God had breathed into him the breath of life, whereby he became a living soul. Thus they fully acquitted Sennertus of the charge brought against him; and waiving any such direct condemnation of his accuser as he had desired, condemned in strong terms the insolent manner in which the accusation had been preferred.