The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English: or, Medicine Simplified, 54th ed., One Million, Six Hundred; and Fifty Thousand — John Stuart Mill — John Shaqi
The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English: or, Medicine Simplified, 54th ed., One Million, Six Hundred; and Fifty Thousand
John Stuart Mill · en
"Fig. 3, which remains solitary, and differs in many respects from the
parent. This little animal, on the other hand, does not produce eggs,
but propagates, by a kind of budding, which gives rise to chains already
seen in the body of their parent(a), and these again bring forth
solitary individuals, etc."
It therefore follows that generation in some animals require? two
different bodies with intermediate ones, by means of which and their
different modes of reproduction, a return to the original stock is
effected.
UNIVERSALITY OF ANIMALCULAR LIFE.--Living organisms are universally
diffused over every part of the globe. The gentle zephyr wafts from
flower to flower invisible, fructifying atoms, which quicken beauty and
fragrance, giving the promise of a golden fruitage, to gladden and
nourish a dependent world. Nature's own sweet cunning invests all living
things constraining into her service chemical affinities, arranging the
elements and disposing them for her own benefit, in such numberless ways
that we involuntarily exclaim,
"The course of Nature is the art of God."
The microscope reveals the fact that matter measuring only 1/120000 of
an inch diameter may be endowed with vitality, and that countless
numbers of animalcules often inhabit a single drop of stagnant water.
These monads do not vary in form, whether in motion or at rest. The life
of one, even, is an inexplicable mystery to the philosopher. Ehrenberg
writes: "Not only in the polar regions is there an uninterrupted
development of active microscopic life, where larger animals cannot
exist, but we find that those minute beings collected in the Antarctic
expedition of Captain James Ross exhibit a remarkable abundance of
unknown, and often most beautiful forms."
Even the interior of animal bodies is inhabited by animalcules. They
have been found in the blood of the frog and the salmon, and in the
optic fluid of fishes. Organic beings are found in the interior of the
earth, into which the industry of the miner has made extensive
excavations, sunk deep shafts, and thus revealed their forms; likewise,
the smallest fossil organisms form subterranean strata many fathoms
deep. Not only do lakes and inland seas abound with life, but also, from
unknown depths, in volcanic districts, arise thermal springs which
contain living insects. Were we endowed with a microscopic eye, we might
see myriads of ethereal voyagers wafted by on every breeze, as we now
behold drifting clouds of aqueous vapor. While the continents of earth
furnishes evidences of the universality of organic beings, recent
observations prove that "animal life predominates amid the eternal night
of the depths of the liquid ocean."
THE ORIGIN OF LIFE.
The ancients, rude in many of their ideas, referred the origin of life
to divine determination. The thought was crudely expressed, but well
represented, in the following verse: