If digestion is a
chemical process, the chemist ought to be able to take bread and meat
and make a red blood corpuscle, which he can not do. Digestion and
assimilation are _vital_ processes. The vital force always eludes the
test of the chemist; but that force is always present in the living
animal economy. The chemist can purchase every ingredient that enters
into the composition of bone except the vital force, without which he
can not make an inch of bone. The making of bone is a vital process
which takes place only in the living animal economy. No physician can
possibly have a correct physiological theory of the cure of disease who
ignores the presence and power and office of the vital force in the
human system.

The body of man was formed of the dust of the ground according to Moses,
and no mistake; Mr. Ingersoll to the contrary notwithstanding. Moses
further says that the Lord God "breathed into his nostrils the breath of
life, and man became a living soul." According to this author, life did
not result from organization. What the Almighty breathed into his
nostrils was not atmospheric air; for the air was in his nostrils before
Jehovah breathed the breath of life into them, and yet it did not make
this body live. Using the term breath in the sense of air that we
breathe, the old adage that "men die for the want of breath" is not
true; for the body dead is surrounded with the same air as when it was
living. When the Creator breathed the breath of life into the
newly-formed body, and man became a living soul, he imparted more to it
than simply air; and when the body dies, something more than simply air
or breath has departed from it. Solomon was wiser than the average wise
acre or the conceited materialistic doctor when he said concerning
death: "Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was; and the
spirit shall return unto God who gave it." "The body without the spirit
is dead," says Inspiration. It is the presence of this spirit in the
human body, imparted to it by the Almighty, which vitalizes the body,
which produces the vital force, by which force the body is builded and
its operations carried on.

As the Creator formed the body of the first man of the dust of the
ground, and vitalized it by breathing into it the breath of life, and
endowed it with a living germ and vital force by which, under proper
circumstances, it reproduces itself; so God said: "Let the earth bring
forth grass, the herb yielding see