ns are intact and properly
oiled. The oil of the watch is represented in the animal by an enormous
quantity of water. In man, for example, water provides about four-fifths
of the whole weight. Given--a colonel weighing a hundred and fifty
pounds, there are thirty pounds of colonel and a hundred and twenty
pounds, or about sixty quarts, of water. This is a fact proven by
numerous experiments. I say a colonel just as I would say a king; all
men are equal when submitted to analysis.

"Professor Meiser was satisfied, as are all physiologists, that to
break a colonel's head, or to make a hole in his heart, or to cut his
spinal column in two, is to kill the little animal; because the brain,
the heart, the spinal marrow are the indispensable springs, without
which the machine cannot go. But he thought too, that in removing sixty
quarts of water from a living person, one merely puts the little animal
to sleep without killing him--that a colonel carefully dried up, can
remain preserved a hundred years, and then return to life whenever any
one will replace in him the drop of oil, or rather the sixty quarts of
water, without which the human machine cannot begin moving again.

"This opinion, which may appear inadmissible to you and to me too, but
which is not absolutely rejected by our friend Doctor Martout, rests
upon a series of reliable observations which the merest tyro can verify
to-day. There _are_ animals which can be resuscitated: nothing is more
certain or better proven. Herr Meiser, like the Abbe Spallanzani and
many others, collected from the gutter of his roof some little dried
worms which were brittle as glass, and restored life to them by soaking
them in water. The capacity of thus returning to life, is not the
privilege of a single species: its existence has been satisfactorily
established in numerous and various animals. The genus Volvox--the
little worms or wormlets in vinegar, mud, spoiled paste, or grain-smut;
the Rotifera--a kind of little shell-fish protected by a carapace,
provided with a good digestive apparatus, of separate sexes, having a
nervous system with a distinct brain, having either one or two eyes,
according to the genus, a crystalline lens, and an optic nerve; the
Tardigrades--which are little spiders with six or eight legs, separate
sexes, regular digestive apparatus, a mouth, two eyes, a very well
defined nervous system, and a very well developed muscular system;--all
these die and revive ten or