An Attempt to Investigate the Seat of Animal Life

Some physiologists, and those of no mean note, have considered the operations of the human frame as a circle of functions governed by mechanical organic laws, as we discover in an hydraulic machine, or automaton, so admirably formed, as by the mere force of its construction to perform and continue the vital motions.

In confutation of such an opinion we have nothing to do more than to introduce the words of the justly celebrated Doct. Whytt. “It seems” (says that writer) “to be incumbent on those philosophers who ascribe the motion of the heart to mechanical causes alone, to demonstrate the possibility of a perpetuum mobile, since as long as life lasts, an animal appears to be really such.”