r other, have been familiarized to severe
reasonings and laborious studies. In Margrave there seemed to be wanting
that mysterious something which is needed to keep our faculties, however
severally brilliant, harmoniously linked together,--as the string by
which a child mechanically binds the wildflowers it gathers, shaping
them at choice into the garland or the chain.

(1) "According to the views we have mentioned, we must ascribe life to
a gas, that is, to an aeriform body."--Liebig: "Organic Chemistry,"
Mayfair's translation, p.363.--It is perhaps not less superfluous to add
that Liebig does not support the views "according to which life must be
ascribed to a gas," than it would be to state, had Dugald Stewart been
quoted as writing, "According to the views we have mentioned the mind
is but a bundle of impressions," that Dugald Stewart was not supporting,
but opposing, the views of David Hume. The quotation is merely meant to
show, in the shortest possible compass, that there are views entertained
by speculative reasoners of our day which, according to Liebig, would
lead to the inference at which Margrave so boldly arrives. Margrave
is, however, no doubt, led to his belief by his reminiscences of Van
Helmont, to whose discovery of gas he is referring. Van Helmont plainly
affirms "that the arterial spirit of our life is of the nature of a
gas;" and in the same chapter (on the fiction of elementary complexions
and mixtures) says, "Seeing that the spirit of our life, since it is a
gas, is most mightily and swiftly affected by any other gas," etc. He
repeats the same dogma in his treatise on "Long Life," and indeed very
generally throughout his writings, observing, in his chapter on the
Vital Air, that the spirit of life is a salt, sharp vapour, made of the
arterial blood, etc. Liebig, therefore, in confuting some modern notions
as to the nature of contagion by miasma, is leading their reasonings
back to that assumption in the Brawn of physiological science by which
the discoverer of gas exalted into the principle of life the substance
to which he first gave the name, now so familiarly known. It is
nevertheless just to Van Helmont to add that his conception of the vital
principle was very far from being as purely materialistic as it
would seem to those unacquainted with his writings; for he carefully
distinguishes that principle of life which he ascribes to a gas, and by
which he means the sensuous animal life, from the i