IntrofJuctory 7 



this principle that became his speculative stronghold, and 

 then his speculative undoing. He made it the basis of his 

 conception of types, and the Type became with him a sort 

 of Platonic Idea, an eternal, more or less subjective entity. 

 It was in the hands of Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Cuvier's 

 early collaborator and later antagonist, that the principle 

 received its best development. Working out a Theory of 

 Analogies in his Philosophical Anatomy, he considers sev- 

 eral possible explanations of analogies but rejects all but 

 three, these being: (1) the relative position, the mutual de- 

 pendence of organs; (2) the elective affinities among the 

 organs, defined to mean that "the materials of the organs 

 survive in some fashion the organs themselves, and, when 

 the latter cease to exist, the analogy nevertheless does not 

 cease"; and (3) the balance of organs, the meaning of which 

 is that "an org^n, normal or pathologic, never acquires an 

 unusual prosperity, without a related organ, or one in the 

 same system, suff'ering for it." ^ 



Saint-Hilaire's application of these principles to the in- 

 terpretation of rudimentary organs and to teretological 

 growths show well the thorough- going objectivity of his 

 conception ; and his Principles of Philosophical Zoology 

 (1830) are only accentuated examples of the fact that the 

 organism as a whole, as he looked upon it, was the organism 

 as composed of all its parts, and further, that he was a 

 genuine biologist if ever there was one, in spite of the fact 

 that if he ever saw any protoplasm there is no evidence that 

 it played any considerable part in his thinking. This whole 

 group of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century 

 biologists must be taken not only as upholders of the or- 

 ganismal theory, but as having greatly advanced its defini- 

 tion and application.* 



* Were it our purpose in this chapter to present an exhaustive critical 

 study of the presence and growth of organismal conceptions in biology 

 it would be necessary to examine somewhere, probably at this point, the 

 ideas of the oryanicists, a group of embryologists and physiologists who 



