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 the external stimuli." He could not claim that this was a distinguishing characteristic between living bodies and brute bodies, and that all the less because he always tried to efface on this point the distinctions which were current in his time, and which were established by Bichat and Cuvier. And so also Le Dantec does not seem to have thoroughly grasped the ideas of the celebrated physiologist on this point when he asserts, as if he were thereby contradicting the opinion of Claude Bernard and his school, that irritability is not something peculiar to living bodies.