MEMOIR OP DUCROTAY DE BLAINVILLE. 179 



He had made no mistake in tlie choice of a vocation ; it was in the chair of 

 the professor especially that De Blainville succeeded in giving lustre to his 

 scientific career. He possessed in the highest degree that ready affluence of 

 ideas, that animated turn of expression, that authoritative tone, which at once 

 overmaster and allure the hearer. He preferred to a calm and judicious caution 

 in sowing the seeds of knowledge, the forms of a bold and imposing logic. To 

 some young and inflammable heads he thus succeeded in communicating an ardent 

 sympathy for the disciple who reared himself in contradiction to a great master ; 

 and jiet that master was Cuvier, in whose fame the youth of France so justly 

 exulted, but in whom they now sought, with a certain malice, to assail the su- 

 periority of the savant, forgetful of the claims of a noble and independent sim- 

 plicity. 



Such successes on the part of De Blainville were not calculated to render 

 relations between the two more complacent. At the close of a sojourn in England, 

 De Blainville returned enriched Avith scientific materials, and Cuvier, supposing 

 his just supremacy to be still respected, asked to have them communicated to 

 him. The traveller contented himself with saying : " In order that they may 

 be more readily at your disposal, I am going to publish them." Thus all things 

 portended a rupture, a pretext for which, with so unconformalile a nature as 

 that of De Blainville, could not long be wanting. Cuvier might regret the op- 

 position of an original and powerful intellect, but he knew at least how to derive 

 from it the advantages of contradiction. As for De Blainville, he depi'ived 

 himself of the benefit of intimate contact with an exalted mind, endowed with 

 every quality requisite for counselling and directing : right reason, luminous^ 

 tranquillity of thought, and that good sense which is the real sovereign and final 

 judge of everything in this world. 



In the rudest shocks of life, the energetic man whose character I am con- 

 sidering seemed to find in labor renewed strength. His cotemporaries coidd not 

 but wonder at the vigor infused into his studies : profound researches, bold dis- 

 cussions, exhaustive historical retrospects,* nothing, in fine, seemed to weary 

 the indefatigable elasticity of this ardent and active mind. In 1822 he published! 

 the first volume of a general treatise on comparative anatomy,\ and M'ith this 

 work a new doctrine made its apjiearance. Cuvier had just reared the science 

 on the experimental method, which proceeds from facts to ideas. In the efforts 

 of De Blainville this order was reversed, and all his labors were based upon the 

 opposite method. 



His first care was to form an abstract type of the living being. Buffon had 

 said : " We can distinguish in the animal economy two parts, of which the first 

 acts perpetually, without any interruption, and the second acts only at inter- 

 vals. The action of the heart and lungs appears to be that first partj the 

 action of the senses and the movement of the body and members seem to be the 

 second." This view became the principle of Bichat's celebrated distinction of 

 two lives — organic life and animal life. Buffon proceeds to say : "If we clothe 

 the interior part with a suitable envelope — that is to say, if we give to it senses 

 and members — the animal life will presently manifest itself, and the more senses, 

 members, and other exterior parts the envelope contains, the more complete will 



* The Dictionary of Natural Sciences contains a great number of very considerable 

 articles by M. de Blainville, who was at the same time one of the most active collaborators 

 of the Bulletin de la Sockte I'hilomathiquc. It may be added, and with litcial truth, that 

 during the whole militant lite of our savant there appeared nothing ou natural histmy which 

 did not undergo ou his part a sort of adverse discussion. Placed by the legacy of his friend 

 M. de Lametherie at the head of the Journal of Physics, he furnished, from Irilti to 1^22, 

 a series of historical resumes, in reading which one cannot fail to be struck with the extent 

 and variety of the knowledge displayed. 



t This volume, the only one he published, is entitled " De V Organization dcs Animaux, 

 ou Principes d' Anatumic Compar6e," and is occupied with the study of the 4^t« and «;>^(ira(ws 

 of the senses in all the classes. 



