[110] Theoria generationis, 1774.
[111] Mémoires de Physique, (1797), p. 250.
[112] Mémoires de Physique, etc. (1797), p. 272.
[113] Huxley’s “Evolution in Biology” (Darwiniana, p. 192), where be quotes from Bonnet’s statements, which “bear no small resemblance to what is understood by evolution at the present day.”
[114] Buffon did not accept Bonnet’s theory of preëxistent germs, but he assumed the existence of “germes accumulés” which reproduced parts or organs, and for the production of organisms he imagined “molécules organiques.” Réaumur had previously (1712) conjectured that there were “germes cachés et accumulés” to account for the regeneration of the limbs of the crayfish. The ideas of Bonnet on germs are stated in his Mémoires sur les Salamandres (1777–78–80) and in his Considérations sur les corps organisés (1762.)
[115] Mémoires de Physique, etc., pp. 318, 319, 324–359. Yet the idea of a sort of continuity between the inorganic and the organic world is expressed by Verworn.
[116] General Physiology (English trans., 1899, p. 17). In France vitalism was founded by Bordeu (1722–1766), developed further by Barthez (1734–1806) and Chaussier (1746–1828), and formulated most distinctly by Louis Dumas (1765–1813). Later vitalists gave it a thoroughly mystical aspect, distinguishing several varieties, such as the nisus formativus or formative effort, to explain the forms of organisms, accounting for the fact that from the egg of a bird, a bird and no other species always develops (l. c., p. 18).
[117] Recherches sur l’organisation des corps vivans (1802), p. 70. The same view was expressed in Mémoires de physique (1797), pp. 254–257, 386.
[118] Here might be quoted for comparison other famous definitions of life:
“Life is the sum of the functions by which death is resisted.”—Bichat.