OPINIONS ON GENERAL PHYSIOLOGY 167 



canal created by nature, the simplest organ of diges- 

 tion." 



In like ic priori manner he describes the creation 

 of the faculty of reproduction. The next organ, he 

 says, is that of reproduction due to the regenerative 

 faculty. He describes fission and budding. Finally 

 (p. 122) he says : 



" Indeed, we perceive that if the first germs of 

 living bodies are all formed in one day in such great 

 abundance and facility under favorable circumstances, 

 they ought to be, nevertheless, by reason of the 

 antiquity of the causes which make them exist, the 

 most ancient organisms in nature." 



In 1794 he rejected the view once held of a con- 

 tinuous chain of being, the ^chelle des itres suggested 

 by Locke and by Leibnitz, and more fully elaborated 

 by Bonnet, from the inorganic to the organic worlds, 

 from minerals to plants, from plants to polyps (our 

 Infusoria), polyps to worms, and so on to the higher 

 animals. He, on the contrary, affirms that nature 

 makes leaps, that there is a wide gap between minerals 

 and living bodies, that everything is not gradated and 

 shaded into each other. One reason for this was 

 possibly his strange view, expressed in 1794, that all 

 brute bodies and inorganic matters, even granite, 

 were not formed at the same epoch but at different 

 times, and were derived from organisms.* 



The mystical doctrine of a vital force was rife in 



* Mtfmoires de Physique, etc., pp. 318, 319, 324-359. Yet the idea 

 of a sort of continuity between the inorganic and the organic world 

 is expressed by Verworn. 



