Page:Life and death (1911).djvu/218

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means, as it will in the minds of the physiologists, that the body of the greyhound is the condition of equilibrium of a heterogeneous, anisotropic, material system, subjected to an infinite number of physical and chemical conditions.

The idea of connecting form, and by that we mean organization, with chemical composition did not arise in the minds of chemists or physiologists. Both have expressed themselves very clearly on this point.

"We must distinguish," said Berthelot, "between the formation of the chemical substances, the assemblage of which constitutes organized beings, and the formation of the organs themselves. This last problem does not come into the domain of chemistry. No chemist will ever claim to have formed in his laboratory a leaf, a fruit, a muscle, or an organ. . . . But chemistry has a right to claim that it forms direct principles—that is to say, the chemical materials which constitute the organs." And Claude Bernard in the same way writes:—"In a word, the chemist in his laboratory, and the living organism in its apparatus, work in the same way, but each with its own tools. The chemist can make the products of the living being, but he will never make the tools, because they are the result of organic morphology."


§ 2. The Acquisition and Re-establishment of the Specific Form.


Acquisition of the Typical Form.—The acquisition of the typical form in the living being is the result of ontogenic work which cannot be examined here. In the elementary being, the plastid, this work is blended