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On the other hand, the faults and foibles of the self-indulgent are accentuated and in such cases old age is a misfortune. No one knows what man's natural length of life is. Anatomists and physiologists compare the human body with the bodies of various animals. In this they are justified, for we all develop according to the same laws.
And the researches of anatomists lend much probability to the assertion, since little pits just under the skin are found, and even sometimes provided with grains of sand in the so-called ear of the lobster, etc., corresponding to the ear bones of the higher animals, the pits being connected with nerves leading to the brain.
Again, the great name of Owen, that jealous king of the anatomical world, had in 1857 supported the assertion, so contrary to the investigations of Huxley himself and of other anatomists, that certain anatomical features of the brain are peculiar to the genus Homo, and are a ground for placing that genus separately from all other mammals in a division, Archencephala, apart from and superior to the rest.
Foureau said nothing, but smiled in a sly fashion, jealous of their having an amusement which he could not afford. The two anatomists pretended to be pursuing their investigations. The people outside, getting bored with waiting, made their way into the bakehouse, and, as they began pushing one another a little, the table shook. "Ah! this is too annoying," exclaimed Pécuchet.
When the assertions, which I have italicised in the above extract, first came under my notice, I was not a little astonished at so flat a contradiction of the doctrines current among well-indormed anatomists; but, not unnaturally imagining that the deliberate statements of a responsible person must have some foundation in fact, I deemed it my duty to investigate the subject anew before the time at which it would be my business to lecture thereupon came round.
Fighting, I said, resembled butting, a performance proper to creatures that grow horns instead of brains . . not to allude to a multitude of telling remarks; and the question "Is man a fighting animal?" my answer being that he is not born with spurs on his heels or horns to his head and that those who insisted on fighting should be examined by competent anatomists, "ologists" of some sort, to decide whether they have the excrescences, and proclaim them . . . touching on these lighter parts of my theme with extreme delicacy.
The second new method of studying the human structure, beginning with the labors of Scarpa, Burns, and Colles, grew up principally during the first third of this century. It does not deal with organs, as did the earlier anatomists, nor with tissues, after the manner of Bichat.
It is fair to mention here, that we owe a great deal to the art of minute injection, by which we are enabled to trace the smallest vessels in the midst of the tissues where they are distributed. This is an old artifice of anatomists.
The unchecked ingenuity of speculative anatomists proved itself fully competent to spin any number of contradictory hypotheses out of the same facts, and endless morphological dreams threatened to supplant scientific theory. Happily, however, there is a criterion of morphological truth, and a sure test of all homologies.
But they are no more inconsistent than the accounts of the growth of a human being would be, if given by two anatomists, of whom one had examined only the skeleton and the other only the respiratory system; and who, therefore, supposed the first, that the animal had been made only to leap, and the other only to sing.
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