THE GENERAL CONSTITUTION OF LIVING BEINGS. 97 



and-dumbness, hydrocephale, double spine, extrophy of the 

 bladder, imperforate state or absence of the latter vessel, 

 anomalies of the heart, the genital organs, etc., are thus 

 irregular actions of the power of evolution as common as 

 they are painful. 



These facts seem to prove the futility of that hypothe- 

 sis of a moulding principle controlling the ovule and the 

 embryo, and fashioning them after its will, in conformity 

 with a premeditated law. They prove too that the birth 

 of the new being consists in a series of births upon births, 

 instead of being effected, as some naturalists have sup- 

 posed, by the successive transformation of parts pree'xist- 

 ing in the ovule. That doctrine of the encasement of 

 germs, or of syngenetic preformation, by which it is con- 

 ceded that the germs of all coming generations were con- 

 tained in one primordial egg, that is to say, that the ovule 

 contains potentially every thing that will exist later in the 

 organism that theory, maintained by Leibnitz, Kant, and 

 several other philosophers and naturalists, seems therefore 

 to be in opposition to observations on the production of 

 the embryo. 



Very clearly the phenomena of evolution and of organ- 

 ization are subject to a law which is expressed by the 

 limits "fixed to evolution, and by the form fixed for the or- 

 gans. This law is not invariable, as the study of diseases 

 and of monstrosities shows ; and, even if it were so, noth- 

 ing gives authority for supposing that it has an origin an- 

 terior or exterior to living beings, any more than for in- 

 ferring it from the mechanism of atoms. Very clearly, in 

 the succession of anatomical growths, there is a gradual 

 creation, and in the series of physiological functions there 

 is a distinct direction; but what boldness it is to infer 

 thence the existence of a creating idea and of a directing 

 idea ! Have we any right thus to assign objective reality 

 to the abstractions of our mind ? Besides, in what man- 



