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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



were not precisely the very acts compatible with 

 life, the animal could not lire, for there is noth- 

 ing contradictory to final causes in the fact that 

 an animal should not live, that is to say, that 

 there should be no animal at all; the strange 

 thing is precisely that there is any animal. The 

 history of the evolution of the embryo, however 

 interesting it may be, does not, therefore, at all 

 destroy the inductions we have drawn from the 

 profound analogies between human art and vital 

 art, for on both sides there are special elements, 

 shaped in a definite manner, and making the 

 production of certain particular acts possible ; 

 but in the case of human art some person inter- 

 venes who makes choice among all these possi- 

 bilities. Why, in vital art, should the material 

 substratum be freed from the necessity of such 

 choice, and why should it spontaneously find out 

 the useful combination which is required by the 

 interest of the whole. In human works, mate- 

 rial conditions are confessed to be impotent to 

 coordinate themselves with reference to a defi- 

 nite effect; why should material conditions in 

 the organisms be endowed with a privilege so 

 extraordinary ? To say that, the elements being 

 given, it follows, of course, that they form them- 

 selves into tissues, and that, the tissues being 

 given, it follows, of course, that they form them- 

 selves into organs, is the same as if one should 

 say that, given the silk threads, they will dis- 

 tribute themselves spontaneously into pieces of 

 stuff, and that when we have a piece of cloth it 

 is the same thing as if we had a coat : now, 

 though the cloth may be fit to become a coat, 

 and the silk-worm's fibres fit to fcrm a piece of 

 stuff, this aptitude for a definite act is not the 

 same thing as the production of the act, and a 

 moving cause is necessary to make it pass from 

 the virtual state to the actual state. In the in- 

 dustry of man we see this moving cause, which is 

 in ourselves ; in Nature's industry we do not see 

 it, but it is as necessary in one case as in the 

 other. 



I will say the same of the explanation which 

 consists in accounting for the vital harmony by 

 the contiguity of organic parts : it is reducing a 

 completely intellectual relation to an external and 

 material relation. Here, too, to say that the har- 

 mony of the living body is explained because its 

 parts touch each other is the same thing as if we 

 were to say that a coat fits well because it has no 

 holes in it. The adjustment of the coat to the 

 body, and the correspondence of the parts, have 

 no relation with the continuity of the piece of 

 cloth, for that continuity existed in the piece even 



before it was disposed into an article of dress. 

 Continuity may explain, if you will, sympathy be- 

 tween the organs, and the communication of im- 

 pressions, but not the cooperation and correspond- 

 ence of organs with functions ; or, further, con- 

 tinuity again might, strictly speaking, account 

 for the adaptation of the neighboring parts, as, 

 for instance, the articulation of the bones, but 

 not for the common and, at the same time, di- 

 verse action of the remote parts. 



In this point, too, consists the difference be- 

 tween the two great zoological laws discovered 

 and announced, one by Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, 

 and the other by Cuvier — the law of connections 

 and the law of correlations. We know in what 

 the law of Cuvier consists : it rests upon the sim- 

 ple and plain idea that in an organized being all the 

 parts must be in agreement to accomplish a com- 

 mon action. We have seen that the law of con- 

 nections, in its turn, rests in this fact, that an or- 

 gan is in an invariable relation of situation with 

 any other given organ. Correlation is a relation 

 of action, of cooperation, of finality ; connection is 

 a wholly physical relation, quite mechanical, one 

 of position, of gearing, in a manner. In a ma- 

 chine, the most widely-separated parts may be 

 in correlation ; only those that are close to each 

 other are in connection. Connection does not 

 explain correlation, nor cau it take the place of it ; 

 in other words, the contiguity of parts does not 

 account for the harmony in the living being. The 

 organism always remains, as Kant and Cuvier 

 defined it to be, " a whole, of which all the parts 

 are reciprocally means and ends," whence it fol- 

 lows that the organism is essentially, and of it- 

 self, the idea of a finality. And this coordination 

 of the parts with the whole is found again not 

 merely in the whole generally, but in each part 

 considered separate and alone, for the parts them- 

 selves are secondary wholes, coordinated with 

 the principal whole. Thus the organs of motion 

 are in relation with the organs of nutrition ; but 

 besides, in the organs of motion, the muscles, the 

 nerves, and bones, are equally in mutual relations, 

 and so on even to the last elements of the organ- 

 ization, which occasioned Leibnitz's saying that 

 organized beings are machines made up of ma- 

 chines. For myself, I cannot understand this 

 coordination, unless the whole preexisted in the 

 form of a plan, and predetermined the parts. 

 Otherwise, these parts, which after all are nothing 

 but mineral matter, must have combined and 

 agreed with each other so as to produce systems 

 so skillfully arranged that human art can hardly 

 imitate them, and even in some cases, as in the 



