RESULTS OF VEGETATIVE FUNCTIONS. 93 long as the vegetable organism is not regularly introduced into it. Electrical state. These remarks are even more applicable to the electrical study of living bodies. Here we find again, and with aggravation, the confusion between organic action and external influence, as well as the aberrations remarked on in physics about ethers and electric fluids. Here, too, we meet with the error observed upon in the last case, about the physiological origin of the phenomenon. And here, again, we are bound to conclude that a permanent electrization is ascribable to acts of composition and decomposition, notwithstanding the electrical variations of the medium. And again we find that the animal functions can only modify, by accelerating or augmenting, more or less, the fundamental phenomenon. But the electrical analysis of the organism is yet further than the thermological from being conceived of and pursued in a rational view. Next follow the general phenomena which result in a less direct and necessary manner from the whole of the vegetative functions:-the production and development of living bodies. Production and development of living bodies. Notwithstanding the original investigations of Harvey and of Haller, with regard to the superior animals, this investigation may be considered, owing to its complexity, to be more in the rear of a positive institution than any of the preceding. The tendency to search for causes and modes of production of phenomena, instead of for their laws, has acted with fatal effect here; and, amidst every kind of deficiency, the main cause of the obscurity of the case is, undoubtedly, that students have occupied themselves in looking for what cannot be found. However, the labours of anatomists and zoologists have evidently prepared the way for a more rational study. It is even worthy of remark that some students who were most bent on the search into causes have been led on by the spread of the positive spirit, to spend their efforts on inquiries into ovology and embryology, which are assuming a more scientific character every day. Still, the preliminary requisite for the formation of doctrine,—a fundamental analysis, -remains unfulfilled; and the ascertainment of the laws of production and development is not, therefore, to be attempted at present. In the lowest departments of the scale, the multiplication of organisms takes place by a simple prolongation of any part of the parent mass, which is almost homogeneous; and in this extreme case, we understand the phenomenon to be analogous to every other kind of reproduction of the primitive cellular tissue. In the higher degrees of the scale, we are in the dark from the moment we depart from immediate observation; and when the simplest previsions are so radically uncertain and even erroneous as in this case, the science may be pronounced to be in a state of infancy, notwithstanding the imposing appearance of the mass of works accumulated for its illustration. The comparative method has been applied in a yet more incomplete way to the phenomena of organic development. The question has never yet been laid down under a form common to all organisms, including the vegetable. The grave error is still committed of studying the development in the animal cases alone; so that the most eminently animal of the systems, the nervous, is represented as the first to appear in the embryo of the higher orders, a supposition adverse to the institution of any really general conception of the theory of development, and in direct opposition to one of the most constant laws of biological philosophy, the perpetual accordance between the chief phases of the individual evolution and the most marked successive degrees of the organic hierarchy; for in this last view the nervous tissue is seen to be the latest and most special transformation of the primitive tissue. The preliminary analysis of organic development is, then, still far from being conceived of in a rational spirit, governed by the high philosophical intention of reconciling, as much as possible, the various essential aspects of the science of living bodies. Decline of the organism. To be complete, this analysis should evidently be followed by the inverse, and yet correlative study of the decline of the organism, from its maturity to its death. The general theory of death is certainly in a very backward state, since DECLINE OF THE ORGANISM. 95 the ablest physiological researches on this subject have usually related to violent or accidental death; considered, too, in the highest organisms exclusively, and affecting functions and systems of organs of an essentially animal nature. As for the deterioration of the organic life, we have yet attained to only one initiatory philosophical glimpse, which exhibits it as a necessary consequence of life itself, by the growing predominance of the movement of exhalation over that of absorption, whence results gradually an exaggerated consolidation of the organism which was originally almost fluid, a process which, in the absence of more rapid influences, tends to produce a state of desiccation incompatible with all vital phenomena. Valuable, however, as is such a glimpse, it serves only to characterize the true nature of the question, by indicating the general direction of the researches which it requires. The important considerations relative to animal life could not be rationally introduced into such a subject till this preliminary doctrine shall have been established; as in regard to all the other points of view before examined. Summary as this review has been, we have seen enough to be authorized to conclude that the backward state of physiological science is owing mainly to the vicious training of physiologists, and the irrational institution of their habitual labours. The circulation of the blood, the first general fact which gave birth to positive physiology; and the laws of the fall of bodies, the first acquisition of sound physics, are discoveries almost absolutely contemporaneous; and yet, what an immense inequality there is now in the progress of two sciences setting out from so similar a disclosure! Such a difference cannot be attributed wholly to the greater complexity of physiological phenomena, and must have depended much also on the scientific spirit which directed their general study, to the level of which the greater number of those who cultivate it have been unable to rise. The phenomena of the vegetative life obviously require, both for their analysis and their expla nation, an intimate combination of the leading notions of inorganic philosophy with physiological considerations, obtained through a thorough familiarity with the preliminary laws relating to the structure and classification of living bodies. Now, each of these inseparable conditions is, in our day, the separate property of a particular order of positive investigators. Hence we have, on the one hand, the supposed organic chemistry, a bastard study, which is only a rough first sketch of vegetable physiology, undertaken by inquirers who know nothing of the true subject. of their labours: and, on the other hand, vague, incoherent, and partly metaphysical doctrines, of which physiology has been chiefly constituted by minds almost entirely destitute of the most indispensable preliminary ideas. The barren anarchy which has resulted from so vicious an organization of scientific labour would be enough of itself to testify to the direct utility of the general, and yet positive point of view which characterizes the foregoing survey. IT CHAPTER V. THE ANIMAL LIFE. T was only by a late and long-prepared effort that the human mind could attain that state of abstraction and physiological generality necessary for the comprehension of all vital beings,--from Man to the vegetable,-as one series. It is only in our own day that a point of view so new and so difficult has been established; and as yet, among only the most advanced minds, even as regards the simplest general aspects of biology,-in the statical study of the organism. It is not at all surprising that physiological comparison should have been first applied to the animal functions, because they first suggest its importance and possibility, however clearly it may afterwards appear that the organic life at once requires and admits a larger and more indispensable application of the comparative method. Looking more closely, however, into this evident existing superiority of animal over organic physiology, we must bear in mind the distinction between the two elementary aspects of every positive study, the analysis of phenomena and their explanation. It is only with regard to the first that the animal life has been in reality better explored than the organic. It is not possible that the explanation of the most special and complex phenomena should be more advanced than that of the most simple and general, which serve as a basis to the others. Such a state of the science would be in opposition to all the established laws of the human mind. However imperfect the theory of organic phenomena still is, it is unquestionably conceived in a more scientific spirit than we find in any explanations of animal physiology. We have seen that the vegetative phenomena approach most nearly to the inorganic; and that the school of Boerhaave sinned only in exaggeration, proceeding from in |