BOOK III. 



OF GROWTH. 

 CHAFFEE I. 



OF THE PKOCESSBS OP GROWTH. 



The organised individual, vegetal or animal, is perpetually 

 mutable and always perishable. It is born, it grows, it dies, 

 after having more or less painfully maintained its organic 

 equilibrium in the midst of the exterior medium. We have ere 

 long to formulate the general laws of the birth, of the generation, 

 of organised beings. Let us now see how these beings grow. 

 Every living creature being definitively constituted by ana- 

 tomical elements, it can only increase in volume by the growth 

 or the multiplication of those elements. 



As to the development in volume of anatomical elements 

 already existing, the phenomenon is relatively simple. There is 

 scarcely anything more before us than a particular case of nutri- 

 tion with, a certain predominance of movement of assimilation 

 over that of disassimilation. The anatomical element or elements 

 acquire more than they lose, and their mass more or less aug- 

 ments. If a complex or organised being is concerned the growths 

 of the elements, isolately considered, totalise themselves, and the 

 whole individual grows and greatens. 



But evidently this mode of growth is insufficient to account 

 for the phases which every organised being traverses from birth 



