ANATOMY AND PHYSIOLOGY 



studied, but the full expression of the " law of co-ordi- 

 nation," as Cuvier called it, had never been explicitly 

 made before; and, notwithstanding its seeming obvi- 

 ousness, the exposition which Cuvier made of it in the 

 introduction to his classical work on comparative anat- 

 omy, which was published during the first decade of 

 the nineteenth century , ranks as a great discovery. It 

 is one of those generalizations which serve as guide- 

 posts to other discoveries. 



BICHAT AND THE BODILY TISSUES 



Much the same thing may be said of another general- 

 ization regarding the animal body, which the brilliant 

 young French physician Marie Francois Bichat made in 

 calling attention to the fact that each vertebrate organ- 

 ism, including man, has really two quite different sets of 

 organs one set under volitional control, and serving 

 the end of locomotion, the other removed from voli- 

 tional control, and serving the ends of the " vital proc- 

 esses" of digestion, assimilation, and the like. He 

 called these sets of organs the animal system and the 

 organic system, respectively. The division thus point- 

 ed out was not quite new, for Grimaud, professor of 

 physiology in the University of Montpellier, had earlier 

 made what was substantially the same classification of 

 the functions into "internal or digestive and external 

 or locomotive"; but it was Bichat's exposition that 

 gave currency to the idea. 



Far more important, however, was another classifi- 

 cation which Bichat put forward in his work on anat- 

 omy, published just at the beginning of the last century. 

 This was the division of all animal structures into what 



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