igO FROM LAMARCK TO ST. HILAIRE. 



may perish, and hoping to direct the current of thought in Biol- 

 ogy to adapt itself to Nature, and not to make Nature adapt her- 

 self to the current of thought. Let us not direct the stream of 

 Nature, but be directed by her. Let us publish a work which 

 will collect the numerous thoughts lying scattered throughout 

 the writings of Natural History, and this generalization will have 

 greater value than all the descriptions of new forms." 



Treviranus thus ranges himself with the school 

 of Buffon, Lamarck, Geofifroy St. Hilaire, and 

 Goethe, as against the school of Linnaeus and 

 Cuvier. He believed that it was possible to dis- 

 cover the Philosophy of Nature, and his whole 

 work is written in an admirable spirit. In the 

 succeeding introductory chapters upon the inter- 

 pretation of living Nature, he considers the impor- 

 tance of Biology, its fundamental principles, possible 

 systems of Biology, methods of experimental Biol- 

 ogy, as well as the use of the hypothesis, — that is, 

 the working hypothesis, — as the essential weapon 

 of progress towards the truth. He defines Biology 

 as "the study of the different forms and appear- 

 ances of organic life, of the conditions and laws 

 under which these exist, and of the causes by which 

 they are kept in operation." In the Laws of Life 

 (p. 58), he points out that every part of the organ- 

 ism is subservient to the whole, that Nature never 

 builds up one organ or system of organs without 

 causing others to suffer reduction. This is equiva- 

 lent to the ' loi de balancement ' of St. Hilaire, or the 

 modern law of ' compensation of growth,' the defi- 



