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 have been of opinion that animals, and even man himself, were the effects of this plastic power.