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The kidneys through the emulgent veins draw that aquosity from thence which you call urine, and there send it away through the ureters to be slipped downwards; where, in a lower receptacle, and proper for it, to wit, the bladder, it is kept, and stayeth there until an opportunity to void it out in his due time.
But if this Spirit of Mercury can be caught, and made corporal, it resolves into a Body, and becomes a pure, clear, transparent water, which is the true spiritual water, and the first Mercurial Root of the Minerals and Metals, spiritual, intangible, incombustible, without any mixture of earthly Aquosity; it is that Celestial water, whereof very much hath been written; for by this Spirit of Mercury all Metals, may if need require, be broken, opened, and resolved into their first Matter, without Corrosive; it renews the age of Man or Beast, even as the Eagles; it consumes all evil, and conducts a long Age to long Life.
Yet the word vitality stands for a reality, it stands for a peculiar activity in matter for certain movements and characteristics for which we have no other term. I fail to see any analogy between aquosity and that condition of matter we call vital or living.
Take from water its aquosity, and water ceases to be water; but you may take away vitality from protoplasm, and yet leave protoplasm as much protoplasm as before. Vitality, therefore, evidently bears to protoplasm a quite different relation from that which aquosity bears to water. Protoplasm can do perfectly well without the one, but water cannot for a moment dispense with the other.
We might call these combined peculiarities of water "aquosity," and as we certainly cannot say why water should possess the lot of them, whilst other compounds of either hydrogen or of oxygen, or, in fact, of any other elements, do not possess this combination, we might say that their presence is due to "the aqueous principle," or "aquosity," which enters into water when it is formed, but does not exist in other natural bodies, and, indeed, "sharply separates aqueous from non-aqueous matter."
There is not a principle of roundness, though "nature centres into balls," nor of squareness, though crystallization is in right lines, nor of aquosity, though two thirds of the surface of the earth is covered with water. Can we on any better philosophical grounds say that there is a principle of vitality, though the earth swarms with living beings?
There is more wit than science in Huxley's question, "What better philosophical status has vitality than aquosity?"
Happily, though such a view would have been considered high philosophy 200 years ago, no one is deluded at the present day into the belief that by calling the remarkable properties of water "aquosity" you have added anything to our knowledge of them.
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