THE GENERAL CONSTITUTION OF LIVING BEINGS. 97 
and-dumbness, hydrocephale, double spine, extrophy of the 
bladder, imperforate state or absence of the latter vessel, 
anomalies of the heart, the genital organs, etc., are thus 
irregular actions of the power of evolution as common as 
they are painful. 
These facts seem to prove the futility of that hypothe- 
sis of a moulding principle controlling the ovule and the 
embryo, and fashioning them after its will, in conformity 
with a premeditated law. They prove too that the birth 
of the new being consists in a series of births upon births, 
instead of being effected, as some naturalists have sup- 
posed, by the successive transformation of parts preéxist- 
ing in the ovule. That doctrine of the encasement of 
germs, or of syngenetic preformation, by which it is con- 
ceded that the germs of all coming generations were con- 
tained in one primordial egg, that is to say, that the ovule 
contains potentially every thing that will exist later in the 
organism—that theory, maintained by Leibnitz, Kant, and 
several other philosophers and naturalists, seems therefore 
to be in opposition to observations on the production of 
the embryo. 
Very clearly the phenomena of evolution and of organ- 
ization are subject to a law which is expressed by the 
limits fixed to evolution, and by the form fixed for the or- | 
gans. This law is not invariable, as the study of diseases 
and of monstrosities shows; and, even if it were so, noth- 
ing gives authority for supposing that it has an origin an- 
terior or exterior to living beings, any more than for in- 
ferring it from the mechanism of atoms. Very clearly, in 
the succession of anatomical growths, there is a gradual 
creation, and in the series of physiological functions there 
is a distinct direction; but what boldness it is to infer 
thence the existence of a creating idea and of a directing 
idea! Have we any right thus to assign objective reality 
to the abstractions of our mind? Besides, in what man- 
