192 THE AMERICAN NATURALIST. [VoL. XXXIII. 
of life yielded many valuable results to chemistry; for, as 
Cowley has expressed it: 
So though the Chymist his great secret miss 
(For neither it in art or nature is); 
Yet things well worth his toil he gains, 
And does his charge and labour pay 
With good unsought experiments by the way. 
And so, though under the influence of erroneous theories and 
in an attempt to elucidate by commentaries the physiological 
ideas of Boerhaave, Haller, between 1746 and 1765, added 
greatly to the knowledge of anatomy and placed another stone 
on the foundation of modern physiology by the discovery of 
the contractility of muscle and the irritability of nerve. 
The close of the century, or, rather, the beginning of the 
nineteenth, was marked by the appearance of a work of far 
different calibre than the majority. I mean the Anatomie 
générale of Bichat, published in Paris in 1801. Bichat combines, 
to a certain extent, the monistic tendencies of Boerhaave with 
the animistic ideas of Stahl, but, making use of Haller’s dis- 
covery and by adding much of his own, he evolves a much more 
scientific and progressive system. He recognizes Stahl’s ani- 
mism as a pure abstraction and supplants it with two physio- 
logical processes, the irritability and contractility of Haller, 
which, he claims, are properties of all organs of the body and 
not of nerve and muscle alone. Digestion, circulation, secre- 
tion, in fact all the functions, are performed by the interaction 
of these two processes. So far this is an improvement in 
Stahl’s ideas, but the great importance of Bichat’s theories rests 
in that he makes these vital processes reside in the solids of 
the body. They are not absolute entities controlling the func- 
tions of the body, but in a sense they are these functions, and 
since disease is a disturbance of the functions, a modification 
of the vital processes, it is dependent upon a modification of 
the solids or tissues of the body. 
Such a theory necessarily led to a more minute and careful 
study of the finer anatomy of the organs of the body, both in 
health and disease, and indeed was the result of such studies 
carried out largely by Bichat himself. That the body was com- 
