52 LIFE ANt) DEATH. 



account for the apparent inconsistency of the result, 

 would bring forward the "caprice" of living nature? 

 And who again would openly dispute the utility of 

 the comparative method ? 



What the physiologists of to-day, according to 

 Claude Bernard, would no longer do, their pre- 

 decessors would do, and not the least important of 

 them. Longet, for example, at a full meeting of the 

 Academic, apropos of recurrent sensibility, and Colin 

 (of Alfort), communicating his statistical results on 

 the temperature of two hearts, accepted more or 

 less explicitly the indetermination of vital facts. And 

 why confine our remarks to our predecessors? The 

 scientists of to-day are much the same. So here 

 again we see the reappearance of the phantom of 

 the final cause in so-called scientific explanations. 

 One fact is accounted for by the necessity of the 

 self-defence of the organism ; another by the necessity 

 to a warm-blooded animal of keeping its temperature 

 constant. Le Dantec has recently reproached zoo- 

 logists for giving as an explanation of fecundation 

 the advantage that an animal enjoys in having a 

 double line of ancestors. We might as well say, as 

 L. Errera has pointed out, that the inundations of the 

 Nile occur in order to bring fertility to Egypt. 



We must not therefore depreciate the marvellous 

 work which has emancipated modern physiology from 

 the tutelage of early theories. The witnesses of this 

 revolution appreciated its importance. One of them 

 remarked as follows, on the appearance of l' Introduc- 

 tion a la Dicdecine experinientaie, which contained, 

 however, only a portion of the theory : — " Nothing 

 more luminous, more complete, or more profound, has 

 ever been written upon the true principles of an art so 



