account for the apparent inconsistency of the result, would bring forward the "caprice" of living nature? And who again would openly dispute the utility of the comparative method?
What the physiologists of to-day, according to Claude Bernard, would no longer do, their predecessors would do, and not the least important of them. Longet, for example, at a full meeting of the Académie, apropos of recurrent sensibility, and Colin (of Alfort), communicating his statistical results on the temperature of two hearts, accepted more or less explicitly the indetermination of vital facts. And why confine our remarks to our predecessors? The scientists of to-day are much the same. So here again we see the reappearance of the phantom of the final cause in so-called scientific explanations. One fact is accounted for by the necessity of the self-defence of the organism; another by the necessity to a warm-blooded animal of keeping its temperature constant. Le Dantec has recently reproached zoologists for giving as an explanation of fecundation the advantage that an animal enjoys in having a double line of ancestors. We might as well say, as L. Errera has pointed out, that the inundations of the Nile occur in order to bring fertility to Egypt.
We must not therefore depreciate the marvellous work which has emancipated modern physiology from the tutelage of early theories. The witnesses of this revolution appreciated its importance. One of them remarked as follows, on the appearance of l'Introduction à la médecine expérimentale, which contained, however, only a portion of the theory:—"Nothing more luminous, more complete, or more profound, has ever been written upon the true principles of an art so
