378 THE HISTORY OF BIOLOGY 



1 8 13, of poor peasant parents, but through the kindness of a priest was given 

 an opportunity of studying. For a time he served as an apothecary's appren- 

 tice at Lyons, afterwards trying his hand at literature, but eventually he 

 devoted himself to medical studies, which he completed in Paris under great 

 privations. He was saved from the necessity of having to seek a living as a 

 country doctor by Magendie, who discovered his brilliant genius and made 

 him his assistant. After holding a number of other posts he became his mas- 

 ter's successor, but in his old age exchanged that appointment for a profes- 

 sorship at the Jardin des Plantes. He had to carry out his experiments for a 

 great number of years in chilly and damp premises, with the result that he 

 contracted an illness that prevented him from doing any practical work for 

 about ten years. Instead he spent this period of his life in literary work on 

 subjects in the theoretical sphere, his writings being very highly thought 

 of. Finally he succumbed to his illness in 1878. During the last years of his 

 life he enjoyed a brilliant reputation; he was the recipient of many high 

 distinctions, both at home and abroad, and his funeral was undertaken at 

 the expense of the French Government. A competent judge (Chr. Loven) 

 declared at his death that the greatest physiologist of the age had passed 

 away, and subsequent generations have not challenged that judgment. And 

 he was no less great as a personality; he was of a warm-hearted and modest 

 nature, and at the same time a brilliant writer and an eloquent speaker. His 

 experiments were carried out in less brutal fashion than Magendie's, but 

 they w^ere as deeply thought out and, if possible, even richer in results than 

 the latter's. 



Bernard's theoretical conception 

 As will have been seen from the above, Bernard's research work comprises 

 not only a series of experimental investigations, but also, during the latter 

 years of his life, a collection of theoretical speculations upon the phenomena 

 of life. He had already formulated his theoretical conceptions in their main 

 features in his early youth, however, and throughout his life worked for 

 the creation of a completely elaborated theory of life. From the beginning 

 he rejects as emphatically as Magendie the vitalism of the Bichat-Cuvier 

 school, though he is not content, like his predecessor, with a general atti- 

 tude of scepticism, but endeavours to analyse the problem of what life really 

 is. Here he arrives at the conclusion that it is not possible to define what 

 life is, but only to analyse its manifestations — that is, Galileo's principle. 

 He groups the manifestations of life under the following headings: "Or- 

 ganisation, Generation, Nutrition, Evolution." Of these he finds the last to be 

 both the most characteristic of life and the most difficult to explain from 

 the purely mechanical point of view; the development, out of an egg, of an 

 individual, all of whose parts, both large and small, are produced in regular 

 sequence and in definite likeness to its parents' — it is that, he thinks, which 



