of the body, gives to the law which regulates their increase in the line of the ascending. genera a new force. Each organ has its own history. It has been ably written in the works of the anatomists of this age. There is, however, an unwritten history which remains to be added to the literature of organic science. A change in the outward form, the type, or the dimensions of an organ in the living animal body, cannot, from the introverted reciprocity which pervades all, occur as a solitary event. It must have been preceded by preparatory occurrences; it must have been succeeded by derivative

sequences.

This chapter, when given to science, will enrich substantially its annals. Compare any single organ of the vertebrate animal with the corresponding organ, when present, of the invertebrate. The difference is remarkable. But compare the entire visceral solids of the one with those of the other. Look at them respectively as multipartite engines designed to accomplish a definite purpose. What disparity of power!

Now place in juxtaposition the products of the actions of these engines severallythe fluids of the invertebrate by the side of those of the vertebrated animal. Is the disparity less striking? It is scarcely possible to conceive that the constructive idea, in two things so widely dissimilar, can be the same. It is so. One is the prolongation of the other plus a few superadded elements.

The bright era will dawn upon the science of living beings when the physiologist, from the examination of the fluids, will be armed with knowledge to deduce the nature, the number, the dimensions, the structure of the productive viscera; and conversely to foretell the constitution and vital standard of the blood from a consideration of the viscera. In this communication it is only practicable to give to these views the form and shape of verbal propositions. The details of demonstrations are, for the present, postponed.

The blood of the fish differs neither less nor more from that of the cephalopod than the visceral solids of the two animals from one another. It cannot be otherwise, if the fluids owe their formation to the agency of the interior solids.

Excluding the lancelet, whose organs generally are inferior to those of myxinoid fishes, think of the new elements which at the fish are added to the machinery of the organism. Though straight and short, the stomach and intestinal canal are capacious. It is here, for the first time in the zoological series, that the liver assumes a separate existence, and becomes internally complicated by a portal and arterial circulation, and a system of excretory ducts. Now the pancreas and the spleen first show their presence in the machinery of organization. It is only at this limit that the renal apparatus has acquired an evident importance. A new and hitherto unknown element of the animal body occurs also at this stage-the absorbent system. What must be the issue of these several complex acquisitions on the side of the elaborative organs, this skilfully contrived involution of parts and super-imposition of specially created structures? The first and most unambiguous result is inscribed on the characters of the fluids. The proteinised principles are raised in amount, and probably improved in quality; colour (hæmatosine,) in a novel manner and place, has appeared. A higher class, a more finished order of floating corpuscles, enters on the scene. Is the ellipticity of their figure a character of degradation? But, withal, the heart still retains the impress of relative inferiority, and the respiration is aquatic.

In the Reptilian organism, what are the signals of elevation? The Batrachia exhibit a long and convoluted alimentary canal, but the stomach is only slightly individualized. This part of the alimentary canal augments more and more, from the Batrachian, through the Ophidian and Saurian, up to the Chelonian orders. As the gastric segment dilates, the intestinal canal shortens. In reptiles, though the liver is relatively large, the product of its action is small, for it operates upon blood which is semi-arterialized, The size of an organ is frequently inversely as its texture; a large and loosely-structured organ does not really present so multiplied an operative superficies as the small but densely-textured. The pancreas betrays indications of higher complexity, as measured by that of fishes. The spleen rises to the consequence of a pronouncedly-developed organ; the heart acquires an additional auricle, and the first trace declares itself of the

*See the excellent article 'Pancreas,' by Dr. Hyde Salter, Cyclop. Anat. and Phys.

presence of a second ventricle. It is here that the grand transition is accomplished from aquatic to the atmospheric method of respiration, in the vertebrated series. Evidences of a more elevated standard are discernible in the fluids. The proportion of fibrin is undoubtedly augmented; the corpuscles are larger, more efficient as instruments for the generation of pigment; the specific gravity* progresses upwards. The entire apparatus of the exterior solids attests the thickening, advancing composition of the fluids.

In birds, the march of organological acquisitions proceeds. The whole digestive apparatus multiplies; its several constituent divisions are involved in the advance. Το the oesophagus is appended a crop; after the crop follows a second dilatation, the proventriculus (the gizzard), the liver, the pancreas; to the system of the blood-making organs is added the spleen. The heart is perfected as a hydraulic mechanism; its contractions increase in frequency. The blood changes for the higher, in several respects; its fibrin more quickly coagulates; the corpuscles lessen in ellipticity of figure, and lose their nuclei. Respiration is quantitatively augmented. By comparison, the sum of the visceral machinery is multiplied unquestionably.

The mammalia crown the countless members of the consistent series thus cursorily and hastily sketched. Every individual organ here attains its maturity of structure; the arithmetic aggregate is greater, the component parts are more elaborately formed. The economic principle of the subdivision of labour is prosecuted to the utmost practicable extreme. On this far-up level stands the human frame, the perfection of animality.† It is here that the prerogative of the erect attitude is first conferred; it is here that a compactly structured heart first drives the blood against gravity-a symbol of superiority. Discoidicity, in the figure of the mammalian blood-corpuscles, supplants the ellipticity of those of the lower vertebrata. In this class, the blood is more complex, of higher specific gravity; the component viscera are weightier, relatively to the weight of the entire body. The mammalian characters culminate in man. In this solitary genus, material and immaterial organizations reach the summit of refinement. On the subtlest and profoundest constituents of the collective system of interior productive solids is graven the impresses of the most finished elaboration; the middle system of the nutritive fluids are here, too, the theatre of the most complex chemistry. It is here, consequently, that the machinery of the exterior solids attains its most perfect and most beautiful development. }

In a future paper a tabulated series of observations will be given, by which the principle will be established, that the arithmetic sum expressive of the specific gravity of the fluids, conducted on the entire scale of the zoological series, will prove of unexpected value in elucidating the fact that the blood, viewed merely as a chemical solution, rises more and more in density as the scale is followed upwards from the lowest to the highest animal. Inferences deducible from such tables of facts will reflect corroboratively upon the reasoning, founded upon totally different evidences, which I have endeavoured to pursue in this and the preceding memoirs.

The material fabric of the living body, animal and vegetable, is raised in standard by a progressive increase in the number and complexity of the parts or organs of which it is composed. The arguments pursued in this and the preceding memoir will, I trust, place this great theory of organization on a secure eminence. Can a wide-stretching law, which rules over the very elements of the ponderable organism, be untrue of its imponderable moiety? If so, there can be no constancy in Nature. But, in truth, the phenomena which express a progressive ascension from low to high, in what is trans-material, psychological, in living beings, are as unequivocal in clearness and significance as the signs which mark the advance of substantive individualities. The conclusion in the two cases is founded upon the same induction. The analogy is full and complete; it cannot be overthrown. Carry the eye downwards along that deep descending file of vitalities which connects humanity with the zoophyte. It may perform the journey by one of two separate yet dependent routes, the physical and metaphysical. As the organism rises in architectural finish, that immaterial principle, of which it is the tenement, rises in the same exact proportion. In the argument as developed in the text, it has been proved that product (the secretion) of the physiological activity is chemically complex if the producing organ be anatomically complex; incomplex if the latter be structurally simple. Why should it, how could it be otherwise, if there be truth in demonstrative reasoning with reference to the products (psychological manifestations) of the activity of the nervous system, itself the sequence of a labyrinth of anterior activities? Could the human intellect sit enthroned on the contracted cerebrum of the fish? The question is ridiculous and incongruous. Could the liver of the radiated animal secrete bile, having the same chemical composition as that which is normally produced by the same organ in the cephalopod? The point is parallel and illustrative. In fact, violate by any supposition the principle of progressive seriality in the psychology of the animal chain, and the mind is landed in caricature and absurdity. The human mind itself is governed by the same law of progressive ascension. Unwind the tangle of this law in the history of nations, and the reality of its governance becomes undeniable!

II trust that the dependent physiological events which, in the argument developed in this memoir, have been traced as a continuous line of light throughout the entire animal kingdom, will hereafter lead to the appreciation of corretatire dependent pathological events in the study of the diseased conditions of the fluids. The fluids are not physiologi cally isolated, how can they be so pathologically? If albumen and fibrin, &c., cannot arise and augment spontaneously, causelessly, it is highly probable that they cannot suffer disease primarily, causelessly, and spontaneously. Theinselves being results, products, their morbid states are extremely likely to be also results or products of anterior disease. If on the entire scale of the animate series there be legible the bright characters of the all-pervading law-that as the antecedent solids, so the consequent fluids; that as the antecedent fluids, so the second great system of solids-it must follow that the same exact order must preside over the development of pathological phenomena. Humoral pathology is a practical impossibility. It is too partial and exclusive to embrace the truth. The science of pathology must rest on a wider basis. What does the dogina of humoral pathology really signify? That the fluids per ipse are pathologized! That effects can happen independently of causes! That causes can assume an operative form without ending in effects! I am deeply convinced that the modern revived phase of the humoral doctrine of disease is as par

The human hand, the faultless instrument of the human mind, the consummate symbol of the completed scheme of nervo-muscularity, could not be grafted on the organism of any inferior member of the series. That phase of bio-chemical science is fast approaching which will establish the prediction, that not only the visceral apparatus and the exterior solids, the system of the nerves and that of the senses, as compared with the corresponding elements in the bodies of all other animals, wear, indeed, the insignia of supremacy, but that the nutrimental media by which the "noble column," standing upright in express image of its Maker, is sustained, will yield to the micro-chemical philosopher of another day proofs, sublime in their wide-spreading and deep-penetrating significance, that they also, as integral parts of that privileged column, are clothed in the habiliments of the

same supremacy.

Now reflect. A moral remains to be pointed. The tale is now to be adorned with one application of the principles of organogenesis, which it has been the hope of this paper to unfold. It is startling; first, from the awe-stricken profundity of the region into which it conducts the human intellect; next, from the perfectly natural and necessary manner in which it logically flows from the successive and cumulative series of demonstrative propositions precedingly enounced. If it be permissible, even within the domain of positive philosophy, to rise, by fair reasoning, from the known to the unknown, from the peopled earth to a "plurality of peopled worlds," from the mortal to the immortal, from matter to spirit, from man's ways to God's, on the wide-opening wings of that imperious "Analogy" which enabled the divine genius of Butler to convince the sceptic, to open a path into the arid recesses of the mind of the most rigid mathematician, along which there now enters therein a luminous and beautiful "ray," whose far-stretching line spans athwart the nubial chasm which divides extant existence, conscious and demonstrable, from a bright and lovely futurity, else indemonstrable by the ars instrumentalis of human reason, the following analogical argument is also permissible.

In the most simple organism everything is simple; not the fluids only, but all the solids, productive and resultant. In the next organism above the lowest, three classes of signs mark an advance, though it be only one step, in its chemical and physiological characters. Ascendingly, when any given element or principle is added to the fluids, it may be predicated with entire certainty, that a correlative addition has been made to the productive solids, and that a proportionate advance will result in the exterior solids. Descendingly, reversely, one class of signs read exclusively would be utterly unintelligible; all, viewed in their connexion, open to the eye of the philosopher a splendid prospect. When Nature is about to add a liver, or a spleen, or a pancreas, or a cerebrum, to the system of the vital machinery already constructed, is it her method to perform the act causelessly, by the mystic interposition of a terror-stricken, because wilful, capricious, unsystematic "Fiat?" Most reverently and most assuredly not. Her footsteps are most legible, most orderly, and, when accomplished, most logically necessary. The physiologist, in travelling upwards along the track of progressional creation, can even now foretell the appearance of a new element in the growing and involving machinery of the living body, with a confidence which is rivalled only by the axiomatic certainty with which the astronomer predicts the return of a comet, or the eclipse of a planet. But let him travel downwards. He successively leaves behind him organ after organ, prinple after principle, element after element, until at length he arrives at the deep-down confines of morphological organization. Now rest for a new thought. Is the inquiring, restless, divine human intellect to terminate at this unexplanative, unsatisfying limit a limit at which God's creative processes are not limited? What! are rule and method, are laws and processes, are constancy of direction and certainty of result, are

tial and false as its archaic prototype. Exclusivism is the emblem at once of narrowness and ignorance. It is the obstructive bane of modern pathology. It ignores that inviolable reciprocity, that intimate neutrality of connexion, which federates into one organism the fluids and solids of the body. Morbidism in resultant fluids, it is impossible reasonably to conceive apart from disease in the causal solids. No single fact has as yet been recorded in pathology which proves that any one or more of the constituent principles of the blood may suffer disease spontaneously. If the antecedent processes executed by the blood-producing solids be normal, the result must be normal. Healthy fibrin, in its chemical place in the fluids, is under the sway of forces which, if normal, render the dis order of its constituent atoms impossible; the disorder must be communicated to it down along a descending path of anterior changes; it is then diffused from it throughout the entire system of the exterior solids. No single advance can be made in the science of pathology but under the torchlight of discoveries achieved in the domains of physiology and organic chemistry.

logical sequence and necessariness of succession, which everywhere else above this limit are palpable in the creational workings of the Maker and Ruler of this illimitable universe, to be fooled, to be abandoned, to be reversed, to be contradicted at this particular, arbitrary, unmeaning confine, the reputed, but not the real, beginning of the atomic and elemental movements which end, result, in the organized form of matter? Credat Judæus! It

is as impossible as that to-morrow the earth will cease to revolve. Philosopher! adventure downwards still, but reverently, for thou art in the presence of the same Almighty whose footprints hitherto thou hast tracked with certainty and truth. Descend; cross the unferried passage which divides organic from inorganic matter. Art thou not on the same road? Most certainly. It is the clear and obvious continuation of that_luminously-defined path by which thou hast descended from man to the "Amabæa." Is thy eye to be here blindfolded? Art thou here to be bereft of reason? Why shouldst thou think, reason, and observe hitherto and no further? No! Be profoundly assured that thou hast the same just grounds for inquiring, analyzing, inferring, observing, &c., below this limit as above it. It is one of those legitimate spheres of study into which its Allknowing and All-seeing Author has invited the human mind. Be not afraid. "Elements and principles," inorganic, cosmic elements move upwards, combine and recombine, until, in the ascending march, organized form is attained in fearless and unswerv ing compliance with those very laws and processes by which they rise from the zoophyte Generatio equivoca! The phrase is nothing but a hollow, senseless sound. Let it henceforth be put calmly aside. The march of thought, of inquiry, and of discov ery will proceed. And the day, oh! glorious morn! will dawn on human science, when the creation of species in time and space, the appearance of a new being, a recently-constructed individuality, on the theatre of visible, palpable existence, will be as clearly, circumstantially, and minutely explained by human science, as it now defines the material conditions which lead to, render necessary, the creation of a new system of living parts, a new organ in the chain of serial organization. Spontaneous, equivocal generation! Let it henceforth be called creation by rule, by conditions. The act of initiating is the same as the act of continuing. The doctrine which contends for the reasonableness of the atomic, elemental movements, which result in the "spontaneous creation" of a new species in geologic time, is now the opprobrium of human science. The time will come when it will be its brightest and highest glory.

to man.

(To be continued.)

ART. II.

The Pathology of Insanity. By JOHN CHARLES BUCKNILL, M.D., Lond., Physician to the Devon County Lunatic Asylum.

WHATEVER differences of opinion may be entertained respecting the causation of insanity when the excitant has been of a moral nature, the following propositions will scarely be disputed.

Granting that the brain is either the organ or the instrument of mental power, and that physical causes are capable of producing insanity, in all cases so originating, an abnormal physical condition of the brain must be, and can only be, the cause of the abnormal condition of the mind.

To express this in more formal terms, we may say, that a physical agent acting upon a material substance can only produce a physical result. Blows, sun strokes, poisons as of fever, are physical agents, which, acting on the brain, are capable of causing, and frequently do cause, insanity. Insanity, therefore, in a considerable number of instances, is the expression of a physical condition of the brain. If the intimate physical state upon which it depends can be demonstrated, it will be for the metaphysicians to prove that all cases, howsoever produced, are not referable to similar conditions. The presence of a sufficient cause for certain phenomena having been ascertained, it is neither logical nor necessary to refer to the influence of other supposable causes. Physical causes are capable of producing syncope, moral causes also are capable of producing it; but

To

since it has been proved by Dr. Burrows, in his work on the Cerebral Circulation,' that all physical causes operate by diminishing the pressure of blood in the cerebral vessels, it is fair to assume that all moral causes operate in exactly the same manner. prove this assumption true, however, would not be easy; and theories about the moral causes of syncope, and the failure of spiritual essences, might be constructed as easily and rapidly as children make edifices of cards. The analogy holds good with regard to the physical and moral causation of insanity. If a physical cause can be demonstrated, it will be against all rules of scientific research to trouble and obscure the argument with other supposable causes, the very nature of which renders them undemonstrable. But is any peculiar condition of the brain, producible by physical agents, and causative of the phenomena of insanity, capable of proof?

We believe that it is. That it has not yet been demonstrated will readily be granted; but that it is demonstrable, we hold to be an opinion in conformity with the confirmed achievements of medical science in relation to other parts of the animal body. It is a subject which is knowable, and not unlikely to become known as soon as we have discovered the proper mode of questioning nature. It has frequently been objected, that because we are never likely to discover the final cause of thought, it is therefore not probable that we shall succeed in detecting the pathological cause of insanity. Thus, the author of the excellent article on Mental Diseases in the 'Dictionnaire du Médecin Practicien,' states:

"Le scalpel, le microscope, les réactifs pourront-ils nous montrer jamais le mécanisme des opérations de l'esprit ? Sait-on pourquoi celu-ci est bon, celui-là méchant? Pourquoi l'un est spirituel, l'autre sot? Quelle est dont cette opiniâtreté a pénétrer les mystères de l'intelligence, lorsqu'on n'a jamais pu soulever le voile qui recouvre la vie organique? Jusqu'alors l'étude des formes et des manifestations nous a seule été permise. Il est probable que l'essence des choses, la cause première, nous echappera toujours."

Nothing, indeed, is more likely, for the essence of things, or final causes, are unknowable; whereas secondary causes are knowable, and are every day becoming known. If it were certainthat the pathological conditions of insanity were rightly to be considered among the essences of things, well might we be disheartened at the prospect of fruitless labour in the attempt to unveil them. The essence of things has not been revealed to us, and is not discoverable by us. There is in nature a holy of holies, into which no high-priest of human faculties may hope to enter; are we therefore to desert the temple of science? Because we cannot reach the sun, are we to abjure the use of light?

Fortunately for the progress of medical knowledge, and for the welfare of the human race, the conditions of disease do not take rank among the essences of things; they occupy a secondary and more accessible grade. We know as little of the essence of secretion as we know of the essence of thought: that is, we know nothing. We are utterly ignorant of the final cause why one set of cells separates from the blood, urine; why another separates bile, and so on. The essence of secretion, like the essence of thought, will in all likelihood be for ever hidden from us. But this reflection has not prevented the secondary phenomena of secretion from being discovered, and deviations from the normal conditions of these phenomena from being recognised as the conditions of disease. And is it not probable that we shall eventually discover the conditions of cerebro-mental disease, not in the inaccessible heaven of final causes, and dependent upon the essence of thought, but on the hill tops of natural phenomena, which are approachable by human patience and industry; not in the reveries of metaphysicians, but in the plodding pursuits of the pathological anatomist?

That investigations into the pathology of insanity have hitherto been somewhat unfruitful of results, need excite little surprise. Structural pathology, and its handmaiden, organic chemistry, have not long been cultivated with that diligence which has in many instances been rewarded with recent and splendid success. It is but yesterday that these sciences were in their nonage, and it would be absurd to object that they have not yet solved the most difficult problem which can be propounded. That discases of the brain constitute the most difficult problem of structural pathology, there can be little doubt; and the principal reason for it may, perhaps, be found in the fact, that brainsubstance bears no apparent relation to cerebral function. We observe a collection of