THE GENERAL CONSTITUTION OF LIVING BEINGS. 65 
gation of facts, deliberate and cautious in establishing prin- 
ciples, joining a broad and all-embracing view of things to 
a most just conviction of the dangers and difficulties of re- 
searches into organized being, a spirit at once very positive 
and very lofty, wanting neither boldness nor noble ambition, 
this great man was destined perhaps to give new and fin- 
ished form to biology, had death not cut him off at the 
age of thirty-two. Yet his unfinished labors have sufficed 
to raise it to remarkable completeness by leading the way 
to the knowledge of living tissues, ‘“ All animals,” says 
Bichat, “ are a collection of various organs, which, while 
each performs one function, all concur, each in its own 
way, in the conservation of the whole. They are so many 
special machines in the general machine which makes the 
individual. Now these special machines are themselves 
made up by several tissues of very different kinds, and 
which really form the elements of those organs.” Taking 
for his base the fact that these various tissues are nearly 
identical whether in some one animal or in another, Bichat 
had fairly the right to bestow on the science that studies 
them the name of general anatomy. Not satisfied with 
describing them exactly, he undertook the categorical 
analysis of their inmost properties. At the same time, he 
caught a glimpse of the function of the fundamental humors 
in the system. 
Death did not suffer Bichat either to extend his discov- 
eries in general anatomy, and apply them to pathology, or 
to draw out from them a new system of medicine. This 
was the work of another highly-endowed man, whose ar- 
dent disposition, amazing vigor of mind, and generalizing 
sagacity, made him one of the most original figures of this 
age. Broussais explained diseases by the alteration of 
the tissues. Rejecting the “imaginary entities” and “ oc- 
cult causes” of ancient medicine, looking for the mechani- 
cal action of morbid disturbances in the study of the func- 
4 
