ter, and using it as a medium for communicating with the
body, and with the outer world in general.

THE VEGETABLE KINGDOM.

As to the vegetable kingdom, there is here, so far as we can discover,
only a duality of principle, viz: the material body and a modified phase
of electro-vitality. These component parts appear to sustain to each
other, in the vegetable, relations quite analogous to those of the
corresponding parts in the animal. But here the _mental_ part is
wanting; and consequently there is no consciousness, sensation, nor
will; and the electro-vital action is guided in its elaborate and
beautiful operations for the forming and developing of the plant, and in
all its vital functions, by the all-pervading mind of God.

NATURAL POLARIZATION OF MAN'S PHYSICAL ORGANISM.

_The electro-vital fluid_, in the animal economy, is subject to the same
principles of polarization as the magnetic current from the artificial
machine, or the magnetism of the bar-magnet. In the material organism of
man, the great nerve-centers--the brain, the spinal cord, and the
ganglions--appear to act the part of fixed magnets, charged with the
electro-vital fluid. Indeed, there is much reason to believe that this
fluid is elaborated within these nerve-centers--more especially within
the brain--from the inorganic electricity of the outer world, which is
supplied through the lungs in respiration, and conducted thence to these
laboratories by a remarkably interesting process--a process which I have
not room here to describe, but which I have drawn out in detail in a
manuscript lecture on the circulation of the blood, for my classes, and
which may some day see the light. These nerve-centers, viewed as magnets
of electro-vitality, require to be regarded as having each a positive
nucleus in the interior, on which are ranged the negative ends of the
currents which go out from this positive nucleus in every direction to
the surface of the medullary organ--so radiating, as it were, from
center to periphery. And the nerve-lines and ramifications which issue
from these great nerve-centers are polarized evidently in the same
way--the electro-vital fluid being disposed with its negative ends to
the positive surfaces of the nerve-centers, and its positive or plus
ends to the "vital organs," and especially to the surfaces of the
organism as a whole. There are many other polarizations in the human
system, subordinate to those mentioned above; but I ha