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TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTELY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



good, both may be very useful, and the authors 

 who follow these different roads should not 

 quarrel. Yet I see that those who labor to ex- 

 plain the beauty of the divine anatomy ridicule 

 others who believe that a movement of certain 

 fluids, apparently casual, could produce so grand 

 a variety of parts, and treat such theorists as 

 reckless and impious. They, on the contrary, 

 regard the former as silly and superstitious, com- 

 paring them to the ancients who called philoso- 

 phers blasphemers when they maintained that 

 thunder is not made by Jupiter, but by some sub- 

 stance existing in the clouds. The better course 

 would be to combine both ways of regarding the 

 subject." 



Nothing is proved against the doctrine of 

 final causes when organic effects are referred to 

 their proximate causes and their determining con- 

 ditions. We may say, for instance, it is not sur- 

 prising that the heart contracts, since the heart 

 is a muscle, and contractility is an essential prop- 

 erty of muscles ; but is it not plain that, if Nature 

 wanted to make a heart that should contract, she 

 must employ a contractile tissue for the purpose, 

 and would it not be most astonishing if it were 

 otherwise? Does that statement explain the 

 wonderful construction of the heart, and the 

 skilled mechanism displayed in it ? Muscular con- 

 tractility explains how the heart contracts ; but 

 this general property, common to all muscles, 

 does not explain how and why the heart contracts 

 in one way rather than another, and why it has 

 assumed a particular configuration, and not an- 

 other. " The peculiarity presented by the heart," 

 says M. Claude Bernard, " is, that its muscular 

 fibres are so arranged as to form a kind of 

 bag within which the sanguine fluid is found. 

 The contraction of these fibres causes a decrease 

 in the dimensions of the bag, and consequently ex- 

 pels, partly at least, the contained fluid. The ar- 

 rangement of the valves gives the proper direction 

 to the liquid expelled." Now, the question that 

 engages the thinker is precisely, to know how it 

 is that Nature, using a contractile tissue, gave it 

 the required structure and arrangement, and how 

 she knew how to make it fit for the special and 

 important function of circulation. The elementa- 

 ry properties of the tissues are the necessary con- 

 ditions employed by Nature to solve the problem, 

 but they do not go a step toward explaining how 

 she succeeded in solving it. M. Claude Bernard 

 himself cannot escape the inevitable comparison 

 between organization and men's works of indus- 

 try when he tells us, " The heart is essentially a 

 living motor machine, a force-pump intended to 



throw into all the organs a liquid called the blood, 

 which nourishes them. In all the degrees of the 

 animated scale, the heart fulfills this function as 

 a mechanical irrigator." 



We must, moreover, follow the learned physiol- 

 ogist we have just cited, in distinguishing between 

 physiology and zoology. " For the physiologist, it 

 is not the animal that dies, but only the organic 

 materials that compose it. Just as an architect, 

 with materials all having the same physical prop- 

 erties, can build up edifices differing greatly from 

 each other in their external form, so Nature, with 

 organic elements possessing identically the same 

 properties, contrives to make animals with organs 

 of prodigious variety." In other words, physiolo- 

 gy studies the abstract, and zoology the concrete ; 

 physiology regards the elements of life, and zo- 

 ology living beings such as they are shaped into 

 reality, with their numberless and diverse forms. 

 Now, who constructs these forms ? Do the ma- 

 terials themselves collect and coagulate to give 

 birth to these complex and skillful arrangements ? 

 It is not we, but M. Claude Bernard, who returns 

 here to the old illustration borrowed from archi- 

 tecture. He says, " We might compare the his- 

 tological elements to the materials man uses to 

 build up his monuments." This gives us occa- 

 sion to recall, with Fenelon, the fable of Amphion, 

 whose lyre attracted the stones, and guided them 

 to group together so as to pile up the walls of 

 Thebes of themselves. In the materialist system, 

 organized atoms thus assemble to form plants and 

 animals, without even a lyre to attract them. No 

 doubt, in order that a house may exist, the stones 

 it is made up of need to have the property of 

 weight ; but does this property explain how the 

 stones make a house ? 



Not only must we distinguish between physi- 

 ology and zoology, but in physiology itself, fol- 

 lowing the same author, we must make a distinc- 

 tion between descriptive and general physiology. 

 General physiology examines organic elements 

 and their properties. Descriptive physiology is 

 compelled to take the organs such as they are, 

 that is, as results made up of combinations of 

 the organic elements. Now it is these results 

 which will always be the object of amazement to 

 man, and which have not been explained by their 

 reduction into elements. Of course, as long as 

 the anatomical or organic elements remain only 

 in the condition of elements, we do not perceive 

 in them the secret of the combinations that make 

 them fit to produce a particular effect, and it is 

 perhaps the same as to the tissues ; but when the 

 tissues transform themselves into organs, and the 



