within certain limits resuscitates as often as you
will, is a phenomenon as unheard of as it appears
at first improbable and paradoxical: it
confounds every received idea concerning animality."
Never did the learned Italian utter
words of more sober reason; we wonder why
his instinctive doubts had so little effect in curbing
his imagination. His experiments were
greatly in vogue, on account of the attractive
manner in which he described them. It must
be confessed that his chapter on this subject,
bearing at the head of every page the inscription,
EXPERIMENTS ON THE ANIMALS WHICH MAY
BE KILLED AND RESUSCITATED AT WILL, was
well adapted to stimulate public curiosity.

The Abbé Fontana was one of the supporters
of revivification. He displayed the
spectacle to persons of distinction who passed
through Florence, but few of his observations
have been given to the public. "He dare not
broach the subject in writing," said Dupaty,
"for fear of being excommunicated: all the
power of the grand-duke could not save him."
Nevertheless, he mentions it, in his celebrated
Treatise on the Poison of the Viper. In these
latter days, Monsieur Doyère, the most ardent
palingenesist of the age, in his Monographie des
Tardigrades, pretends that these animals are able
to support very high temperatures and absolute
desiccation, without losing the faculty of resurrection.
It is this thesis which has been demolished
by M. Pouchet. It ought also to be
mentioned that, within the last few years,
Schultze made considerable efforts to increase
the number of resurrectionists. He exhibited
to a great number of persons, samples of sand
which had remained in a dry state for a considerable
period, and which became full of
rotifers after being moistened. Nor did he confine
himself to this simple display; he distributed
in all directions, by letter, little packets
of sand, apparently inanimate, but which the
mere application of moisture, under the eyes of
his marvelling correspondents, proved to be full
of living creatures. This experiment may be
repeated any day, and thinking men are now
unanimous in considering it absolutely insignificant,
as far as the solution of the question is concerned.

Extraordinary examples of tenaciousness of
life are far from rare in the annals of natural
history. The love of the marvellous, which has
exerted its influence on men of well-merited
reputation, has often led them to reproduce
these wondrous accounts without sufficient
examination. Intestinal worms and their eggs
have been believed to be capable of undergoing
ordeals which are now contested by those best
acquainted with the worms themselves. Certain
persons have gone so far as to credit the existence
of reviviscible serpents. Bouguer speaks
of an amphisbena, which is most commonly met
with near the mouth of the Orinoco, which is
seen to come to life again after it has been ten
years dried, either in the open air, or on the
branch of a tree, or even inside a chimney. To
enjoy this phenomenon, it is only necessary to
plunge the reptile in water that has been exposed
to the sun.

It is essential to observe that, with the resurrectionists,
the question is not to prove that the
vital functions may be incompletely suspended
for a greater or less duration of time by the
effect of physical causes, but that they may be
completely annihilated without compromising
the animal's existence; in short, that an
animal completely mummified, may be resuscitated
by the influence of water externally and
internally applied.

Some observers have shown unparalleled
levity in the way in which they have settled the
question, whilst Ehrenberg had the wisdom not
to do so till after he had carefully examined and
refuted, one by one, the hypotheses of the resurrectionists.
Ehrenberg has demonstrated, with
great logical force, that "the cessation of vital
movement in any animal is evidently death." In
fact, whensoever in any animal the embryonic
life has commenced, its absolute suspension is
absolute death. The egg of the rotifer may,
probably, be preserved for a very long time in a
stagnant state, but, as is the case with the egg
of a fowl, or with the seed even of a vegetable,
when once its vital cycle has commenced its
orbit, no absolute suspension is possible. Even
if such a number of justly renowned naturalists
had not protested against the resurrection of the
rotifers and the tardigrades, Ehrenberg alone
would suffice to crush all its partisans. He and
Bory de St. Vincent do not hesitate to say that
"desiccation is death." Consequently, the
former of these writers is right in asserting that
the animalcules which people believe they have
revivified have never been absolutely dried in
the sand which contained them. In this case,
he says, the sand and the moss preserve them
from desiccation, exactly as the thick garments
of the Arabs protect them from the burning heat
of the desert.

The whole question is laid open and explained
in these few words. The rotifers, the tardigrades,
and the anguillules, are preserved under
the protection of their envelope and by the help
of the hygroscopicity of the sand, precisely as
happens to a multitude of adult animals or their
progeny, under analogous circumstances; and
the only reason why certain philosophers have
regarded as a prodigy, facts which are frequently
occurring in zoology, is, because they have not
embraced the subject from a higher and more
general point of view. This make-believe resurrection
is not at all more extraordinary than the
return to active life— we cannot say to existence
— of certain animals which remain for a
year and more contracted and motionless within
their natural envelope.

If we cast but a mere glance at the entire
zoological series, we shall soon perceive that the
vital resistance of certain animals, or of their
reproductive bodies, is even more and otherwise
remarkable than the phenomenon of the revivification
of animalcules, reduced to its legitimate
value. The eggs of insects, on the branches of
trees, resist the rigours of severe and variable