ANATOMY AND PHYSIOLOGY 



derful and useful as it had been, must be advanced upon 

 before the new material could be satisfactorily disposed 

 of. The way to a more natural system, based on less 

 arbitrary signs, had been pointed out by Jussieu in 

 botany, but the zoologists were not prepared to make 

 headway towards such a system until they should gain a 

 wider understanding of the organisms with which they 

 had to deal through comprehensive studies of anatomy. 

 Such studies of individual forms in their relations to the 

 entire scale of organic beings were pursued in these last 

 decades of the century, but though two or three most 

 important generalizations were achieved (notably Kas- 

 par Wolff's conception of the cell as the basis of or- 

 ganic life, and Goethe's all-important doctrine of meta- 

 morphosis of parts), yet, as a whole, the work of the 

 anatomists of the period was germinative rather than 

 fruit-bearing. Bichat's volumes, telling of the recog- 

 nition of the fundamental tissues of the body, did not 

 begin to appear till the last year of the century. The 

 announcement by Cuvier of the doctrine of correlation 

 of parts bears the same date, but in general the studies 

 of this great naturalist, which in due time were to 

 stamp him as the successor of Linnaeus, were as yet 

 only fairly begun. 



