THE GENERAL CONSTITUTION OF LIVING BEINGS. 65 



gation of facts, deliberate and cautious in establishing prin- 

 ciples, joining a broad and all-embracing view of things to 

 a most just conviction of the dangers and difficulties of re- 

 searches into organized being, a spirit at once very positive 

 and very lofty, wanting neither boldness nor noble ambition, 

 this great man was destined perhaps to give new and fin- 

 ished form to biology, had death not cut him off at the 

 age of thirty-two. Yet his unfinished labors have sufficed 

 to raise it to remarkable completeness by leading the way 

 to the knowledge of living tissues. " All animals," says 

 Bichat, " are a collection of various organs, which, while 

 each performs one function, all concur, each in its own 

 way, in the conservation of the whole. They are so many 

 special machines in the general machine which makes the 

 individual. Now these special machines are themselves 

 made up by several tissues of very different kinds, and 

 which really form the elements of those organs." Taking 

 for his base the fact that these various tissues are nearly 

 identical whether in some one animal or in another, Bichat 

 had fairly the right to bestow on the science that studies 

 them the name of general anatomy. Not satisfied with 

 describing them exactly, he undertook the categorical 

 analysis of their inmost properties. At the same time, he 

 caught a glimpse of the function of the fundamental humors 

 in the system. 



Death did not suffer Bichat either to extend his discov- 

 eries in general anatomy, and apply them to pathology, or 

 to draw out from them a new system of medicine. This 

 was the work of another highly-endowed man, whose ar- 

 dent disposition, amazing vigor of mind, and generalizing 

 sagacity, made him one of the most original figures of this 

 age. Broussais explained diseases by the alteration of 

 the tissues. Rejecting the " imaginary entities " and " oc- 

 cult causes " of ancient medicine, looking for the mechani- 

 cal action of morbid disturbances in the study of the func- 

 4 



