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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.
He wondered that his wit was so little understood, but expected that his audience would comprehend it by degrees, and persisted all his life to shew by gross buffoonery, how little the strongest faculties can perform beyond the limits of their own province. No. 180. <gr> Ta<u?>t' eidwoes isqi, mathn d' 'Epicouron eason <gr> Ho<u?> tooe cen<ooen zhte<i?>n, caioe tines ai monades.
In his opinion the report by Franklin, by Lavoisier, by Bailly, is, in the scientific life of those learned men, what the Monades were for Leibnitz, the Whirlwinds for Descartes, the Commentary on the Apocalypse for Newton. These examples may enable us to judge of the rest, and render all farther refutation unnecessary.
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