720 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF HENRY MILNE EDWARDS. 



tbese inuideious laws and the substitution of an authorized ceititicate 

 for the actual presence of the infant. Tlieir opinion was founded upon 

 unanswerable i) roofs, but it is not easy to contend against the routine 

 of established custom. This reform did not take place, still another 

 generation was needed to receive it with tolerance; it i:: only in our day 

 that the principle at stake has been definitely acknowledged. 



111. — HIS 'JHEORKTICAL VIEWS. 



Enough notice has been given to the books and special work of 

 Milne Edwards. Surely the original and special studies of a learned 

 man are the necessary basis of his work, and it is principally by means 

 of such that he acquires authority. However, these do not constitute 

 his entire work, and often not the essential i)art of it. This last rests 

 rather upon the labors accomplished as a whole by the author, by unit- 

 ing his individual work with the bearing of the general ideas and theo- 

 ries he promoted. This confirmation is not wanting to Milne-Edwards. 

 From tlie beginning of his career he wrote treatises on the diffusion of 

 knowledge among the people, specially useful in lines of instruction 

 that set forth the views and natural laws for which his name still 

 stands. 



These views were principally developed in works of a more original 

 character that still remain to science, such as the Natural History of 

 Crustaceans, which comprises this order as a whole, uniting and co-ordi- 

 nating the results of the first part of his scientific career; the Introduc- 

 tion to General Zoology, and Lessons on the Physiology and Comparative 

 Anatomy of Man and Animals, a vast encyclopedia of nature in four- 

 teen volumes, setting forth the labors of his contemporaries and treating 

 the general systems that have held a place in the science of the nine- 

 teenth century. 



The Natural History of Crustaceans, was written in the first years of 

 the reign of Louis Philippe, a short time after the death of Cuvier, and 

 under the inspiration of the lively disputes that had first taken jilace 

 between him and Geoftry Saint-IIilaire with regard to the unity and 

 correlation of organic systems in animal species. Milne-Edwards con- 

 tributed his quota of new facts and original views to these theories 

 of natural philosophy. He held to the anatomical structure of the 

 tegumentary skeleton of a great zoological type — the crustaceans — a 

 skeleton having homologous j)arts that fulfil the most opposite func- 

 tions, locomotion, prehension, mastication, sight, touch, respiration, 

 generation, etc. According to him the body of the crustacean type is 

 comi)osed of twenty-one zoonites or elementary animals, associated so 

 as to constitute the animal as a whole; each of these zoonites, sup- 

 ported by a special stem that is connected with the solid framework or 

 dermo-skeleton and constitutes a central ring with parts hanging to 

 it, thus forming a double series of members. If the zoonites always 

 resembled each other we would have a uniform organism repeating 



