66 NATURE AND LIFE. 
tions while regular, fully understanding the value of deep, 
searching study into the properties cf organized matter, 
this famous physician, by his work upon fevers, inflamma- 
tions, and insanity, completely changed the teachings of 
his time. Reducing the essential attributes of living mat- 
ter to one sole property, irritability, he endeavored to show 
how disturbances of the system depend on the increase or 
decrease of that. This was rather an hypothesis at a venture, 
which needed modification afterward; but he had gained 
so true an insight into the spring of vital phenomena, he 
had penetrated so deeply into the secret of all modes 
of organic activity, that the whole of medicine was illu- 
minated by that proposition. Broussais had shown, at any 
rate, that disease does not occasion the appearance of new 
properties in the constituent parts of organs, but results 
from disorder in the intricate manifestation of usual proper- 
ties. He had perceived that the laws of disease are only 
particular cases of those general laws governing the exist- 
ence of animal tissues. 
Blainville did not go beyond Bichat as regards the 
tissues, but he understood far better the action and organ- 
ization of those liquid parts distinguished by the name of 
humors, and he added the knowledge of these to the ac- 
quisitions of general anatomy. He traced the coincident 
history of the tissues and the humors, both regarded as 
constituent and undivided parts of the system; and he 
threw new light upon the systems that are formed by the 
grouping of similar tissues. During the time of Blain- 
ville, that is, in the first third of this century, foreign sa- 
vants, applying to the living tissues of animals the same 
method of observation applied by Mirbel to vegetable ones, 
discovered that all these tissues, far from being homogene- 
ous, are made up by the interweaving of corpuscles differ- 
ent in form and kind, only visible under the microscope, 
and which are called anatomical elements. They brought 

