VI PREFACE. 



1 have begun each chapter, with an abridged history of 

 the principal discoveries made respecting the system of organs 

 which comj&ose it; to enable me, the better to compile some 

 of these historical notices, I made free use of Lauth's History 

 of Anatomy, of which as yet one volume only is published. 



The introduction treats, in the first section, of organization 

 in general, and in the second, of the human body. It was my 

 intention, in the first section, to give merely to my reader a 

 general idea of comparative anatomy and physiology. In so 

 doing, it was not my object to exempt the student from 

 studying the anatomy of animals; but on the contrary, to 

 show them the utility of this kind of knowledge. In writing 

 this part of the introduction, I have profited by the labours of 

 Dumeril, Blainville, Geoffroy Saint Hilaire, Lamarck, and 

 especially of those of Cuvier, whom I could have cited at 

 every page. In the second part of the introduction, I have 

 given general views of the human body ; I have spoken of its 

 humours generally, part of the science of organization too 

 much neglected, since Haller and his school, who erroneously 

 thought they had found the whole secret of life in the nervous 

 system, and in the phenomena of irritability and sensibility. 



Anatomy not being an object of mere speculation and sterile 

 curiosity to the physician, but the basis of all knowledge re- 

 lating to medicine, I thought that physiology and pathology, 

 ought not to be entirely separated from it. Pathological 

 anatomy, particularly, ought, in my estimation, to be connected 

 with special anatomy, and in this view, the description of each 

 tissue is terminated, by a brief survey of the varieties and 

 alterations therein observed, and the whole work itself is con- 

 cluded by a chapter on anomalous or accidental productions, 

 common to all, or to several kinds of organs. 



P. A. BECLARD. 



Paris, August 30th, 1223. 



