66 NATURE AND LIFE. 



tions while regular, fully understanding the value of deep, 

 searching study into the properties cf organized matter, 

 this famous physician, by his work upon fevers, inflamma- 

 tions, and insanity, completely changed the teachings of 

 his time. Reducing the essential attributes of living mat- 

 ter to one sole property, irritability, he endeavored to show 

 how disturbances of the system depend on the increase or 

 decrease of that. This was rather an hypothesis at a venture, 

 which needed modification afterward ; but he had gained 

 ;so true an insight into the spring of vital phenomena, he 

 had penetrated so deeply into the secret of all modes 

 of organic activity, that the whole of medicine was" illu- 

 minated by that proposition. Broussais had shown, at any 

 rate, that disease does not occasion the appearance of new 

 properties in the constituent parts of organs, but results 

 from disorder in the intricate manifestation of usual proper- 

 ties. He had perceived that the laws of disease are only 

 particular cases of those general laws governing the exist- 

 ence of animal tissues. 



Blainville did not go beyond Bichat as regards the 

 tissues, but he understood far better the action and organ- 

 ization of those liquid parts distinguished by the name of 

 humors, and he added the knowledge of these to the ac- 

 quisitions of general anatomy. He traced the coincident 

 history of the tissues and the humors, both regarded as 

 constituent and undivided parts of the system ; and he 

 threw new light upon the systems that are formed by the 

 grouping of similar tissues. During the time of Blain- 

 ville, that is, in the first third of this century, foreign sa- 

 vants, applying to the living tissues of animals the same 

 method of observation applied by Mirbel to vegetable ones, 

 discovered that all these tissues, far from being homogene- 

 ous, are made up by the interweaving of corpuscles differ- 

 ent in form and kind, only visible under the microscope, 

 and which are called anatomical elements. They brought 



