5500 Zoology : its present Phasis 



never really existed here. At no period was it ever strictly anatomical, 

 experimental, practical, but vacillated as Philosophy itself has done 

 (metaphysical, we mean), between the extreme of utter scepticism and 

 the most slavish of doctrines— the theory of final causes. There never 

 was any medium or middle course, for Science and common sense — 

 it was ever Middleton and Tyndall on one hand or Paley and Croly on 

 the other : men were called on to take a side — to stand by the Mosaic 

 deluge or the ' Vestiges of Creation.' Continental scientific men look 

 on with wonder, and ascribe it to the climate and to the temper of the 

 islanders : a hypocrisy which has been called " organized," but which 

 must mean " organic," has no doubt something to do with it. The 

 question resolves itself into this, — is life an inherent quality of matter 

 from the beginning, an essential to it, and requiring but certain cir- 

 cumstances to call it forth ? This is a simple-enough proposition, 

 perfectly intelligible and in every way probable ; so soon as it has 

 been demonstrated it will take its place in Science — but not till 

 then. 



A word in conclusion of this section of this brief critical inquiry 

 into the present scientific phasis of modern physiology. If the doc- 

 trines of the metamorphoses of organs, in the sense given to the term 

 by Etienne Geoffroy (St. Hilaire), ever made any progress in France, 

 we are certain that, with few exceptions (remarkable enough, no doubt), 

 they were never admitted by the transcendental anatomists of Britain ; 

 none of them ever believed that branchiae or gills could be metamor- 

 phosed into lungs, or vice versa ; that the opercular apparatus of fishes 

 was the metamorphosed ossicula ouditus ; that the prostrate gland 

 and the uterus w T ere analogous or homologous ; that the reproductive 

 organs are identical in the embryo of either sex, and are convertible 

 into each other by a law of sexuality applied to both sexes : no such 

 doctrines ever made any progress in Britain. On the contrary, we 

 know* that the whole doctrine was objected to so early as 1821, in 

 the presence of GeofTroy himself, and in his own study ; that again in 

 1827 and 1828 this pretended metamorphosis of organs, the refutation 

 of which M. Fleurens claims in 1844, was distinctly refuted in a Me- 

 moir read before the Royal Society of Edinburgh, at that time under 

 the presidency of Sir Walter Scott, and afterwares published in the 

 ' Medical Gazette.' In that memoir the theory of duplicate organs, 

 in the foetus, as a type of certain great systems of organs, is explained 

 by a reference to these organs themselves ; is supported by embry- 

 ology, by the discoveries of Rathke, by a history of the ducts of 

 Malpighi and Gaertner, and by dissections of hermaphrodite struc- 

 tures placed before the Society. The term, then, dedoublement 

 organiquef is not a happy phrase, for, in reality, there is no such 

 thing in one sense, either anatomically or physiologically ; the 

 branchiae of the chick are not the doublure of the lungs, nor the 



* See ' Great Artists and Great Anatomists,' by B. Knox. London : Van 

 Voorst. 



f Fleurens. 



