MODERN PHILOSOPHICAL BIOLOGY. 597 



with respect to the constituent j^arts of the living individual were 

 more successful. It was not enough to know in a general way that 

 the phenomena observed in living things are in the last resort the 

 same in kind as those which are known as physico-chemical, and that 

 they obey the same laws. Between the phenomena of living things 

 and those of inanimate Nature there existed too wide a chasm ; there 

 was no way of passing, deductively, from physico-chemical laws to 

 vital phenomena, and the scientific explanation of organic forms and 

 of functions was of necessity defective. The author of the " Anatomie 

 generale " simply recognized in organs various elements, which he 

 grouped in families, with a view to define, under the general name of 

 tissues, the basis of their structure. In these elements he recognized, 

 independently of their physical and chemical properties, special prop- 

 erties which he justly denominated vital, inasmuch as it is by them 

 that life manifests itself, and which are, properly speaking, the function 

 of these elements. Bichat's generalizations were, doubtless, in his own 

 mind, in opposition to the theory which refers vital phenomena to 

 physico-chemical properties ; in point of fact, they have established a 

 relation between functional facts and the general properties of matter. 

 The functional facts of organs are explained by the elementary prop- 

 erties of the tissues ; and the latter, though we cannot as yet refer 

 them to physico-chemical properties, are, nevertheless, brought into 

 remarkably close relation with them through our modern ideas of the 

 constitution of organic substances and the principle of the equivalence 

 and transformation of forces. 



Still, these relations could not be perceived prior to the discovery 

 of the relations which connect organisms and their tissues with exter- 

 nal forces possessed only of physico-chemical properties; and this 

 conception dates from a time long after Bichat's day. We have rea- 

 son for believing that the part assigned by Lamarck to the action of 

 external circumstances upon organisms first suggested this conception, 

 owing to one of those mysterious operations of the mind which, out 

 of an idea vaguely descried, and even, perhaps, not accepted in the 

 form in which it first presented itself, forms a nucleus around which 

 experience and reasoning group proofs, and which the inventive faculty 

 develops under the form of a doctrine apparently brand-new. The 

 doctrine of the action of "general external modifiers," which Blain- 

 ville sets forth summarily in his " Cours de Physiologic generale et 

 coraparee," by no means possessed, even in his own mind, all the im- 

 portance it later assumed in science under the name of "doctrine of 

 media," after Auguste Comte had given it so prominent a place in his 

 " Biologie." But, by bringing upon the scene the action of external 

 circumstances upon the sum total of a living organism, and by calling 

 attention to the eflfects they produce therein, whether as stimulating 

 or reviving the functions, or as suspending the same, Blainville pre- 

 pared the way for a better interpretation of vital phenomena ; and 



