United States or Ukraine ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
What a wonderful gauge of his own value as a scientific critic does he afford, by whom we are informed that phrenology is a great science, and psychology a chimæra; that Gall was one of the great men of his age, and that Cuvier was "brilliant but superficial"! How unlucky must one consider the bold speculator who, just before the dawn of modern histology which is simply the application of the microscope to anatomy reproves what he calls "the abuse of microscopic investigations," and "the exaggerated credit" attached to them; who, when the morphological uniformity of the tissues of the great majority of plants and animals was on the eve of being demonstrated, treated with ridicule those who attempt to refer all tissues to a "tissu générateur," formed by "le chimérique et inintelligible assemblage d'une sorte de monades organiques, qui seraient dès lors les vrais éléments primordiaux de tout corps vivant;" and who finally tells us, that all the objections against a linear arrangement of the species of living beings are in their essence foolish, and that the order of the animal series is "necessarily linear," when the exact contrary is one of the best-established and the most important truths of zoology.
The dislike that Voltaire had conceived for the Qoran from a superficial acquaintance with it, "ce livre inintelligible qui fait fremir le sens commun a chaque page," probably increased his unfavourable opinion, but the principal motive of his choice of a representative must have been that the general public still regarded Mohammed as the incarnation of fanaticism and priestcraft.
Word Of The Day