Page:Life and death (1911).djvu/172

 anatomical basis, the cell. The cellular theory sums up the teaching of general anatomy or histology.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century anatomy was following a routine dating from ancient times. It divided animal and vegetable machines into units in descending order, first into different forms of apparatus (circulatory, respiratory, digestive, etc.); then the apparatus into organs examined one by one, figuring and describing each of them from every point of view with scrupulous accuracy and untiring patience. If we think of the duration of these researches—the Iliad, as Malgaigne says, already containing the elements of a very fine regional anatomy—and especially of the powerful impulse they received in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, we shall understand the illusion of those who, in the days of X. Bichat, could fancy that the task of anatomy was almost ended.

As a matter of fact this task was barely begun, for nothing was known of the intimate structure of the organs. X. Bichat accomplished a revolution when he decomposed the living body into tissues. His successors, advancing a step in the analysis, dissociated the tissues into elements. These elements, which one would have thought were infinitely varied, were reduced in their turn to one common prototype, the cell.

The living body, disaggregated by the histologist, resolves under the microscope into a dust, every grain of which is a cell. A cell is an anatomical element the constitution of which is the same from one part to the other of the same being, and from one being to another; and its dimensions, which are sensibly constant throughout the whole of the living world,