Marie-Henri Ducrotay de Blainville. 201. 
Buffon had added: “‘ Let us invest the interior part in a 
suitable envelope, that is to say, let us give to it senses and 
members, animal life will soon manifest itself; and the more 
fully the envelope shall contain the senses, members, and 
other exterior parts, the more complete will the animal life 
appear, and the more perfect will be the animal.” 
M. de Blainville combines these two ideas of Buffon. 
There is in life, two lives—the life of nutrition and the life of 
sensation. 
Buffon saw nothing in the general envelope but the ex- 
terior part, the seat of the sensations. M. de Blainville 
regards this envelope as continued, becoming folded, penetrat- 
ing into the interior, and becoming the seat of the respiratory 
and digestive systems. 
Lastly, just as there are two lives, there are likewise two 
great kinds of apparatus—the vascular and the nervous—and 
on these two apparatus all the organs depend; on the first, 
the organs of sense and motion ; on the second, the organs of 
secretion and nutrition. | | 
The abstract type of a living being once settled, it affords 
to M. de Blainville a new frame-work where all the details 
of Comparative Anatomy, almost infinite in number, become 
classified and concentrated. The various structures seem 
nothing more than realised instances of a previous concep- 
tion. The dogmatic process is substituted for the experi- 
mental, and M. de Blainville may likewise call himself a 
master and a great one, for he has transfused into the 
‘science the complexion of his mind and his own peculiar 
originality. 
So many and such laborious efforts had for a long while 
secured a place for M. de Blainville in the Academy. He 
‘was admitted in 1825. In 1830, a royal ordinance having 
divided the educational duties of the Museum of Natural 
History devoted to the illustration of the invertebrate ani- 
mals, M. de Blainville was naturally chosen, in consequence 
of his beautiful works on the Mollusca and Zoophytes, to 
occupy one of the two chairs. 
Thus, although he was late in devoting himself to the 
‘sciences, he obtained the most favourable position they could 
