170 MEMOIR OF GEOFFEOY SAINT HILAIRE. 



of total ignorance passed under the name of monstrosities. In the last 

 century the question regarding monsters had been the subject of a 

 Igng debate between two members of the academy, Winslow and 

 Lemery, of whom the first may be said to have completed in the 18th 

 century the anatomy of the human body, commenced by Vesalius in 

 the 16th; the second was the son of that Nicholas Lemery whom 

 Mairan styled the Descartes of chemistry. Lemery was himself a 

 Cartesian, Winslow altogether a Leibnitzian: the former held that 

 there were no monsters except from accidental and mechanical causes; 

 the latter simply supposed the pre-existence of monsters, as Leibnitz 

 had supposed the pre-existence of beings. The dispute lasted for 

 ten years, until the death of Lemery in 1743; and, as was remarked 

 by Fontenelle, "it was not possible, as things went on, that it could 

 be terminated otherwise than by the death of one of the disputants, 

 for at every new explanation offered by Lemery, Winslow launched at 

 him a new monster." It was reserved for Geoffroy to carry the 

 theory of accidental causes to a point of such clear and incontestable 

 evidence that it is no longer feasible to seek for any other. And this, 

 by virtue of two principles which suffice to explain everything, the 

 principle of arrest of development and that of attraction of similar parts, * 

 principles educed as well from his own ideas as from the concurrent 

 labors of the eminent anatomist, Serres, who was the friend of his 

 whole life. The result of the long and persistent inquiries of Geoffroy 

 on this subject may be summed up in the expression: there are no 

 monsters; there are merely accidental and secondary anomalies. 



In the first volume of his Philosophie Anatomique, wherein he laid 

 the foundations of his sj^stem, the principle of unity of composition is 

 applied, in a direct manner at least, only to vertebrate animals; and, 

 confined within these limits, this important principle could not be 



<* By means of the first of these principles Geoffroy explains all monstero by defect ; by 

 the second all double monsters. Ihe paits which are wanting, or of which there is only 

 a rudiment or vestige, are abortive, that is, parts arrested in their development. When 

 two foetuses or germs unite, so as to produce the double nionttrosity, they always unite by 

 similar parts, by similar tissues or organs ; the heart of one foetus uniting with the heart of 

 another, the brain with the brain, the half of the pelvis of one with the half of that of the 

 other, &c. This attraction of similar parts received from Geoffroy the more abstract name 

 of attraction of self for self, {soi pour soi,) and was regarded by him as a general law of 

 nature, though we here consider it only as a physiological principle. Lemery had already 

 said : "A reflection is forced upon us by a fact often repeated in the suljects before us, the 

 fact that all destructions anrt regenerations of parts which liave there tuken place have only 

 done so througli the reciprocal action of two similar parts, llie stomach, for instance, 

 having effected with another stomach what it could not do with a liver, is there not room 

 to conjecture that homogeneity of substance permits in the first case what heterogeneity 

 prevents in the second ?" — {Mem de l' Academic des Sciences, p. 351, 354, an. 1740. ) 



In 1822 Geoffroy collected his early memoirs on the subject in a volume entitled Philoso- 

 phie Anatormque: Des MonstrmsUies Humaines, and in 1827 published in the Dictionnaire Classique 

 d' Htstoire Nuturellc an article, Cunsideraiions Generates mr les Momtres, which contains the most 

 precise and elaborate diciest of his theories His son, Isidore Geoffroy, connecting his own 

 studies with those of his father, published in 1832 the most important and complete work 

 on this subject which there is room to desire, entitled 7Vaite de Teratolugie, or a general and 

 special history of the anomalies of organization. — (See also Recherches d' Anatomie Tianscen- 

 dante, &c., par M. Serres — Theory of Growth and Deformity applied to explain the Organi- 

 zation of ilitta-Christina ; Paris, 1833. Tr.) 



