Obituary.

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LIFE; ITS NATURE, VARIETIES, AND PHENOMENA.

LIFE is the prime phenomenon of the universe. There is no place where life is not present, and there never was a time when life had not begun. For in the great, composite fact of a CREATOR are involved the elemental facts of Omnipresence and Eternity of Existence, and these in turn involve Infinite Creative Activity, which is the production and sustentation of arenas of ever-renovated life. To suppose the Creator ever to have been idle or unproducing, would be to suppose him inconsistent with himself. Doubtless each one of the countless orbs of the universe had its own birth-day, (for the whole kingdom of materiality as necessarily had a beginning as any particular animal or plant,) and some worlds and systems of worlds may be comparatively in their childhood; but a period when there were no worlds the finite mind cannot conceive. Ancient as our own world is, there were 'morning stars' which 'sang together' at its nativity. Doubtless, too, every shape of organized existence had its own special era of commencement, as illustrated in the sequentialism of the fossils beneath our feet; but these véry fossils shew at the same moment, that organic life is contemporaneous with the consolidation of the worlds which it embellishes, and thus with the dayspring of Time. The very purpose of a world's creation is that it shall be at once clothed and made beautiful with life. For thus saith the Lord that created the heavens; God himself that formed the earth and made it; He hath established it; He created it not in vain; He formed it to be inhabited.' (Isaiah xlv. 18.)

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Under the term Life, however, rightly regarded, is comprehended far more than it is ordinarily used to denote. We err, if when thinking of the habitations of life, we associate it only with ourselves, animals, and plants. Life, in its proper, generic sense, is the name of the sustaining principle by which everything out of the Creator subsists, whether worlds, metals, minerals, trees, animals, mankind, angels, or devils, together with all thought and feeling. Nothing is absolutely lifeless, though many things are relatively so; and it is simply a restriction of the term, for conventional purposes, which makes life signify no more than the vital energy of an organized, material body. The life which works in your organized frame,' said Laon, is but an exalted condition of the power which occasions the accretion of particles into this crystalline mass. The quickening force of nature through every form of being is the same.' 'The characteristic,' observes another quick-sighted writer, which, manifested in a high degree, we call Life, is a characteristic manifested only in a lower degree, by so-called inanimate objects.' Coleridge, Oersted, Guyot, and many other masters in natural philosophy, express themselves in similar terms. The language of poetry, or rather of the poetic sentiment, the golden key to the essential meanings of words, and the teacher of their right applications, has from ages immemorial shewn that life is no mere term of physiology; and Scripture, which is the sum and immortal bloom of all poetry, pronounces in its usages a divine confirmation. Something far higher and grander than mere accident or conformity to other men's example, must needs underlie the fact that in the multiplicity and power of its figurative applications, the word Life has no equal; or that fact would not flash upon us, as it does, from all tongues and times: and the reason so high and grand is that that which we ordinarily call 'Life,' namely, organic, physiological life, is the exponent and explanatory phase of a principle felt to be omnipresent, and though manifold in expression, uniform in its entity. The profound, unerring perceptions of the harmonies of nature, which were the original architects, and are the conservators and trustees of language, acknowledge no private property in words; and though conventionalism and contraction of view may seek to enslave particular terms, as in the present instance; ever and ever do those perceptions free them from their bonds, and pass them on to their rightful inheritances. Hence it is that on the lips of the poet; that is, on the lips of every man who is in closer alliance with God, and Truth, and Nature than are the multitude; words which with the vulgus, have but one solitary, narrowed meaning, are continually found serving new and brilliant purposes, which Taste appreciates and relishes

delightedly. Strange and unnatural as its phrases may sound to the undeveloped mind, figurative language, rightly so called, is Nature's high-priest of Truth. 'Rightly so called,' because metaphors and similes founded upon mere arbitrary or far-fetched comparisons, though often confounded with figurative language, are but its mockery and caricature. True figurative language is the echo of the divine, immortal harmonies of nature, and thus their faithful expositor, and an epitome of the loftiest philosophy of the universe.

It is this proper, generic significance of the word Life, which we propose to recognize and illustrate in the following pages; physiological or organic life taking its place, not as life absolutely and exclusively, but as one manifestation among many.

When it is popularly said, then, that one thing is animate, and another inanimate; that life is present here, but absent there; all that is essentially involved in the words is that a particular manifestation of life is absent or present. Such phrases come simply of confounding Expression, which is variable; with Principle, which is uniform. A particular presentation of life is contemplated, and thus not only is the principle itself imperfectly apprehended; but every thing which does not conform to the assumed impersonation of it, is pronounced contrary to that which in reality has no contraries. Just as with popular notions of what constitutes Religion, which it is impossible rightly to apprehend and define, so long as it is confounded with the forms of faith, and the modes and attitudes of worship, by which it is locally sought to be realized. 'The sentiment is natural, invariable, and indestructible, but the form is artificial, variable, and transitory.' It is a mere assumption, for instance, that only that is alive which presents the series of physical phenomena and actions called growth, feeding, motion, sensation, reproduction, &c. Life confines itself to no such scanty costume; and as if it would rebuke the penuriousness of a doctrine which so limits and degrades it, often forbears from all the more striking phenomena of the series, in the very departments of nature of which they are asserted to be characteristic; and expresses itself so slenderly, that science needs all its eyes and analogies to discern it. In many of the lower forms of fungi, for instance, and in the sponge, both of which forms of being, by reason of their attenuated presentation of life, have been regarded in time past, as connected with the mineral kingdom. Fungi have been thought to be the work of insects, built up by them as corals are by polyps; while sponges have been deemed mere concretions of the foam of the sea. There is found,' says old Gerarde, growing upon the rocks neare unto the sea, a certaine matter wrought

together of the fome or froth of the sea, which we call spunges.' (Herbal, p. 1578.) It is proper to remark, however, that by Aristotle, the father of natural history, the animal constitution of sponges was well known. So with the beautiful frondose zoophytes called Sertularia, Thuiaria, Plumularia, Flustra, &c., left in such abundance on our sandy shores, by the retiring tide, and commonly confounded with sea-weeds; from which they are, nevertheless, readily distinguishable by their semi crystalline texture, and their whitish-brown colour; the prevailing colours of true sea-weeds being pink, green, or dark olive. So late as a century ago, the mineralogists disputed the zoological and botanical claims to the possession of these beautiful beings, contending that they were formed by the sediment and agglutination of a submarine, general compost of calcareous and argillaceous materials, moulded into the figures of trees and mosses by the motion of the waves, by crystallization, (as in salts,) or by some imagined vegetative power in brute matter.' (Johnston, History of the British Zoophytes, 2nd edit. Vol. 1, p. 408.) Ray himself seems not to have made up his mind about them, for though in some of his writings he indicates a correct apprehension of their nature, in the Wisdom of God manifested in the Works of Creation,' he includes them among ‘inanimate, mixed bodies,' or stones, metals, minerals, and salts.' 'Some,' says he, 'have a kind of vegetation and resemblance of plants, as Corals, Pori, and Fungites, which grow upon the rocks like shrubs.' pp. 105-106. (4th edition, 1704.) The fact is, the notions of life and of what lives, as of the whole, genuine truth in any other matter, are things essentially of growth and modification for the better. The popular notion of life is not a censurable one. It necessarily precedes; the error being to remain in it, after it has been shewn to be only part of a truth. Nothing is more needful to advancement in philosophy than to distinguish between what is actually true, and what is only apparently true. It is this, indeed, which establishes the main difference between the intellectual conditions of childhood and maturity, and thus between their counterparts, the uncultivated and the cultivated mind. To the former, the sun veritably rises and sets, while the earth stands still;-apparently true certainly, yet in direct antagonism to fact. Similar is the apparent and genuine truth concerning where is life; only that here the error is of defect rather than contrariety. Tell the dull-witted, uninformed man that the grey, leatherlike fungus upon the old paling, lives as veritably as he himself does, and he will laugh at you. To him, eating, drinking, and movement from place to place alone indicate life. You may get his assent perhaps to the propo