94 NATURE AND LIFE. 



defined acts, the permanence of types; in short, all the 

 striking and remarkable characteristics which give so dis- 

 tinct an expression to organized beings. These questions 

 have been handled by Robin with a logical exposition 

 as original as it is learned. 



Claude Bernard has written a very admirable book, 1 in 

 which he expounds, under the name of determinism, the 

 doctrine which establishes the indissoluble combination of 

 all the conditions necessary to production of the phenomena 

 of life. In it he demonstrates that these phenomena are 

 rigidly fore-defined, in the sense that they are produced ac- 

 cording to fixed and unchanging laws, as express as those 

 which govern the mineral world, and that no intermeddling 

 of caprice could disturb the order imposed by these laws. 

 For the illustrious physiologist there is no such thing as a 

 vital principle any more than there is a mineral principle, 

 that is, an entity distinct from the phenomena themselves. 

 Yet he admits that, from the moment of the appearance of 

 the earliest elements of the embryo, the evolution of these 

 phenomena does obey a law or a premeditated idea, gov- 

 erning by anticipation the phases of the coming existence. 

 In a late and very remarkable work, a Robin has unfolded 

 ideas quite different from these. The distinguished anato- 

 mist, supported by the views of modern embryogeny as it 

 has been established by the Pr4vosts, Dumas, Coste, Rei- 

 chert, and Bary, and by himself, sees in the harmony and 

 unity of the organism the spontaneous result of the con- 

 course of those energies peculiar to each anatomical ele- 

 ment. He finds in it the necessary consensus of the un- 

 conquerable tendencies of these myriads of monads, each 

 having by itself its part and its direction, and this view re- 

 veals to him in an unexpected light the solution of the diflfi- 



1 "Introduction to Experimental Medicine," 8vo, 1867. 



2 " On the Appropriation of the Organic Parts and the Organism to 

 the Accomplishment of Ordained Actions," 8vo, 1869. 



