680 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



ridicule of our satirists. Medicine and physiology in that era were 

 treated under the form of philosophic argument, science and imagina- 

 tion were blended, and " reasoning banished reason." The history of 

 transfusion, at its beginning, looks like an important but empirical dis- 

 covery ; new experience rests simply on scholastic discussions, the 

 true miugles with the false, and, after the spectacle of a barren con- 

 test presented by detractors and enthusiasts, transfusion was pro- 

 scribed, and doomed to oblivion ; and it will be long before its recov- 

 ery, for the true scientific method has not yet been found. 



In the last half-century we have returned to the method of observa- 

 tion ; nor is that method now, as it was in Harvey's time, the privilege 

 of a few savants ; it has become the guide of all men of science in our 

 day, and the real cause of scientific progress. Amid the general de- 

 velopment of the sciences, transfusion has come up once more, trans- 

 formed and widened ; it will not satisfy the extravagant hopes in- 

 dulged at first, but it will throw a broad light on the problem of 

 health and disease. The principles on which this grand experience 

 now rests are well settled the functions of the blood have been clearly 

 determined. We know that life dwells in every fragment of our be- 

 ing ; the mass of nerves, the flesh of our muscles, the tissue of our 

 glands, need the indispensable assistance of the blood, yet live by them- 

 selves. If general anatomy has followed out the work of Bichat, in 

 studying the elements of dead Nature, physiology has realized Haller's 

 conception, in analyzing the functions of these elements. Comparative 

 study of animal and vegetable organization and the independent de- 

 velopment of the tissues, after the evolution of the germ, has supplied 

 general views upon the life of the parts ; physiological dissection on 

 the living animal, and particularly the mode in which poisons act, 

 has completed the former results, and shown that each element in the 

 organism has its individual activity. The experience of transfusion 

 gains greater importance at this day, proportioned to the advanced 

 state of science. Transfusion is not simply an operation practised on 

 man ; it finds its peculiar reason for existing as a process in scientific 

 investigation. By it the properties of tissues and organs are analyzed, 

 the independent life of the elements is once more made plain, and, 

 when the secrets of the mechanism of our organization have thus been 

 laid bare, transfusion is no longer an experimental remedy it has be- 

 come a process of reasoning. 



At a time like our own, while the movement of minds is turning, 

 with almost exclusive devotion, toward the justly-valued labors of Ger- 

 many, it is not without interest to recall a course of discoveries pe- 

 culiarly French. The history of transfusion in the nineteenth century, 

 after the account of the fruitless efforts made in the seventeenth, has 

 the advantage, besides, of allowing us to judge of the worth of meth- 

 ods by the nature of their results. These scientific triumphs of late 

 date have hitherto been preserved only in special publications ; but 



