PLASTIC, denotes a thing endowed with a formative power, or a faculty of forming or fashioning a mass of matter, after the likeness of a living being; such a virtue as some
of the ancient Epicureans, and perhaps the Peripatetics too, imagined to reside in the earth, or at least to have anciently resided therein, by means whereof, and without any extraordinary intervention of a creator, it put forth plants, &c. Some of them seem to be of opinion, that animals, and even man himself, was the effect of this plastic power.