[1104] Mr. Nasmyth, in his valuable, but, I regret to add, posthumous work, notices, as the result of these discoveries, ‘the close affinity subsisting between the dental and other organized tissues of the animal frame.’ Researches on the Development, &c. of the Teeth, 1849, p. 198. This is, properly speaking, a continuation of Mr. Nasmyth's former book, which bore the same title, and was published in 1839.
[1105] This name, which Mr. Owen appears to have first suggested, has been objected to, though, as it seems to me, on insufficient grounds. Compare Owen's Odontography, vol. i. p. iii., with Nasmyth's Researches, 1849, pp. 3, 4. It is adopted in Carpenter's Human Physiol. 1846, p. 154; and in Jones and Sieveking's Patholog. Anat. 1854, pp. 483, 486.
[1106] See the correspondence in Brit. Assoc. for 1841, Sec., pp. 2–23.
[1107] In the notice of it in Whewell's Hist. of Sciences, vol. iii. p. 678, nothing is said about Mr. Nasmyth; while in that in Wilson's Human Anatomy, p. 65, edit. 1851, nothing is said about Mr. Owen. A specimen of the justice with which men treat their contemporaries. Dr. Grant (Supplement to Hooper's Medical Dict. 1848, p. 1390) says, ‘the researches of Mr. Owen tend to confirm those of Mr. Nasmyth.’ Nasmyth, in his last work (Researches on the Teeth, 1849, p. 81), only refers to Owen to point out an error; while Owen (Odontography, vol. i. pp. xlvi.–lvi.) treats Nasmyth as an impudent plagiarist.
[1108] Dr. Whewell (Hist. of Induc. Sciences, vol. iii. p. 678) says, that ‘he has carried into every part of the animal kingdom an examination, founded upon this discovery, and has published the results of this in his Odontography.’ If this able, but rather hasty writer, had read the Odontography, he would have found that Mr. Owen, so far from carrying the examination ‘into every part of the animal kingdom,’ distinctly confines himself to ‘one of the primary divisions of the animal kingdom’ (I quote his own words from Odontography, vol. i. p. lxvii.), and appears to think, that below the vertebrata, the inquiry would furnish little or no aid for the purposes of classification.
[1109] But in comparing the merits of discoverers themselves, we must praise him who proves rather than him who suggests. See some sensible remarks in Owen's Odontography, vol. i. p. xlix.; which, however, do not affect my observations on the superiority of method.
[1110] By a new method of inquiring into a subject, I mean an application to it of generalizations from some other subject, so as to widen the field of thought. To call this a new method, is rather vague; but there is no other word to express the process. Properly speaking, there are only two methods, the inductive and the deductive; which, though essentially different, are so mixed together, as to make it impossible wholly to separate them. The discussion of the real nature of this difference I reserve for my comparison, in the next volume, of the German and American civilizations.
[1111] In literature and in theology, Chateaubriand and De Maistre were certainly the most eloquent, and were probably the most influential leaders of this reaction. Neither of them liked induction, but preferred reasoning deductively from premises which they assumed, and which they called first principles. De Maistre, however, was a powerful dialectician, and on that account his works are read by many who care nothing for the gorgeous declamation of Chateaubriand. In metaphysics, a precisely similar movement occurred; and Laromiguière, Royer Collard, and Maine de Biran, founded that celebrated school which culminated in M. Cousin, and which is equally characterized by an ignorance of the philosophy of induction, and by a want of sympathy with physical science.
[1112] Bichat, Recherches sur la Vie et la Mort, pp. 5–9, 226; and his Anat. Gén. vol. i. p. 72.
[1113] ‘C'est de là, sans doute, que naît cette autre différence entre les organes des deux vies, savoir, que la nature se livre bien plus rarement à des écarts de conformation dans la vie animale que dans la vie organique…. C'est une remarque qui n'a pu échapper à celui dont les dissections ont été un peu multipliées, que les fréquentes variations de formes, de grandeur, de position, de direction des organes internes, comme la rate, le foie, l'estomac, les reins, les organes salivaires, etc…. Jetons maintenant les yeux sur les organes de la vie animale, sur les sens, les nerfs, le cerveau, les muscles volontaires, le larynx; tout y est exact, précis, rigoureusement déterminé dans la forme, la grandeur et la position. On n'y voit presque jamais de variétés, de conformation; s'il en existe, les fonctions sont troublées, anéanties; tandis qu'elles restent les mêmes dans la vie organique, au milieu des altérations diverses des parties.’ Bichat sur la Vie, pp. 23–25. Part of this view is corroborated by the evidence collected by Saint Hilaire (Anomalies de l'Organisation, vol. i. pp. 248 seq.) of the extraordinary aberrations to which the vegetative organs are liable; and he mentions (vol. ii. p. 8) the case of a man, in whose body, on dissection, ‘on reconnut que tous les viscères étaient transposés.’ Comparative anatomy supplies another illustration. The bodies of mollusca are less symmetrical than those of articulata; and in the former, the ‘vegetal series of organs,’ says Mr. Owen, are more developed than the animal series; while in the articulata, ‘the advance is most conspicuous in the organs peculiar to animal life.’ Owen's Invertebrata, p. 470. Compare Burdach's Physiologie, vol. i. pp. 153, 189; and a confirmation of the ‘unsymmetrical’ organs of the gasterpoda, in Grant's Comparative Anatomy, p. 461. This curious antagonism is still further seen in the circumstance, that idiots, whose functions of nutrition and of excretion are often very active, are at the same time remarkable for a want of symmetry in the organs of sensation. Esquirol, Maladies Mentales, vol. ii. pp. 331, 332.