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They vary in size from the one hundred-thousandth to the one twenty-thousandth of a second of an inch in diameter, and appear at first hardly more than moving specks of semi-translucent mucus. Indeed, Burdach calls them "primordial mucous layers."
Burdach, Buffon, Pouchet, Needham, and other professed vitalists, agree that in all life-manifestations there must be some preA"xisting vital force or principle, without which no living thing, whether plant or animal, can come into existence. M. Pouchet says: "I have always thought that organized beings were animated by forces which are in no way reducible to physical or chemical forces."
Burdach, when all deductions were made, still found it necessary to retain the belief in maternal impressions, and Von Baer, the founder of embryology, also accepted it, supported by a case, occurring in his own sister, which he was able to investigate before the child's birth.
This latter is associated with the Host, or Agnus Dei. Still less is the Spear to be found in connection with the Grail in its Food-providing form of a Dish. No doubt to this, critics who share the views of Golther and Burdach will object, "but what of the Byzantine Mass? Do we not there find a Spear connected with the Chalice?"
It will not surprise any one with knowledge of these things that a child so insatiable for love should become hysterical. "Her sensitiveness was unnaturally exaggerated," also she was seized once with a hysterical convulsion, as Burdach relates. She died young and "the flower of my life was past. The fairest, purest joy was extinguished for me. I had wished her for myself and Heaven had heard me.
She lay in bed near her little one, her arm twined about his body and slept with him until morning. No wonder that the boy was so sensitive to womanly charm and likewise that later different women looked upon him as their lover. The thought early established itself with Burdach that only such a relationship could satisfy him as that in which he had stood toward his mother.
I can therefore see a large significance in the somewhat bold language of Burdach: "There is for me but one miracle, that of infinite existence, and but one mystery, the manner in which the finite proceeds from the infinite.
As the old physiologist Burdach pointed out, the mother is awakened by the whimpering of her child, the miller by the cessation of his mill, most people by gently calling out their names. This attention, thus on the alert, makes use of the internal stimuli arising from repressed desires, and fuses them into the dream, which as a compromise satisfies both procedures at the same time.
It is easy to conceive a sexual motivation in this second instance if we remember that in the first sleep walking something sexual surely took place. Still more probable is the strongly forbidden sexual goal, if we take into consideration the circumstances of his life. In his autobiography "Rückblick auf mein Leben" Burdach tells us how extraordinarily his mother depended upon him.
The same doctrine reappears in various forms: in the popular works of Derham and Paloy and the Bridgewater Treatises; in the learned and thoughtful pages of Burdach, and in the mystical rhapsodies of Oken. But never, we believe, was it before enforced and illustrated by so imperial a survey of the whole domain of Natural Science as in the volumes before us.