OPINIONS ON GENERAL PHYSIOLOGY 167 
canal created by nature, the simplest organ of diges- 
tion.” 
In like & przorz manner he describes the creation 
of the faculty of reproduction. The next organ, he 
says, is that of reproduction due to the regenerative 
faculty. He describes fission and budding. Finally 
(p. 122) he says: 
“Indeed, we perceive that if the first germs of 
living bodies are all formed in one day in such great 
abundance and facility under favorable circumstances, 
they ought to be, nevertheless, by reason of the 
antiquity of the causes which make them exist, the 
most ancient organisms in nature.” 
In 1794 he rejected the view once held of a con- 
tinuous chain of being, the échelle des étres suggested 
by Locke and by Leibnitz, and more fully elaborated 
by Bonnet, from the inorganic to the organic worlds, 
from minerals to plants, from plants to polyps (our 
Infusoria), polyps to worms, and so on to the higher 
animals. He, on the contrary, affirms that nature 
makes leaps, that there is a wide gap between minerals 
and living bodies, that everything is not gradated and 
shaded into each other. One reason for this was 
possibly his strange view, expressed in 1794, that all 
brute bodies and inorganic matters, even granite, 
were not formed at the same epoch but at different 
times, and were derived from organisms.* 
The mystical doctrine of a vital force was rife in 
* Mémotres de Physique, etc., pp. 318, 319, 324-359. Yet the idea 
of a sort of continuity between the inorganic and the organic world 
is expressed by Verworn. 
