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M. BROUSSAIS, "Traité de Physiologie appliquée a la Pathologie," 1828. "Systême de la Nature," I. 2, 10, 86, 101, and passim. This eloquent text-book of the Atheism of the last century is dissected and refuted by M. BERGIER in his "Examen du Materialisme," 2 vols. Paris, 1771. M. COMTE, "Cours," I. 44, 141. M. CROUSSE, "Des Principes," pp. 84, 86.
Partly because France was not blessed with a king like William of Orange, and partly because the new systeme de bascule, the balance system, in which the king allows each faction in turn to hold the reins of power, was discovered. So, instead of the gradual growth of constitutional liberty which took place in England, the tendency in France was back to absolutism.
He believed that he had gained a true insight into the processes of animate nature, and he reiterated his hypotheses over and over, particularly in the introduction to his Histoire Naturelle des Animaux sans Vertebres, in 1815, and in his Systeme des Connaissances Positives de l'Homme, in 1820. He lived on till 1829, respected as a naturalist, but almost unrecognized as a prophet.
For the results of Agassiz's researches on the Alpine glaciers, to which he devoted much of his time and energy during ten years, from 1836 to 1846, the reader is referred to his two larger works on this subject, the "Etudes sur les Glaciers," and the "Systeme Glaciaire."
And he was led to conclude, that "man does not consist of two principles so essentially different from one another as matter and spirit, which are always described as having no one common property by means of which they can affect or act upon each other." In the "Systême de la Nature," the same argument is often urged.
At the end of the eighteenth century, Delambre, in his work Sur la Base du Système métrique décimal, clearly gives us to understand that magnitudes of the order of the hundredth of a millimetre appear to him incapable of observation, even in scientific researches of the highest precision.
His sublime intellectual probity never suffered itself to be tempted. He protested against the doctrines of Helvétius's book, de l'Esprit, and of D'Holbach's Système de la Nature, at a moment when some of his best friends were enthusiastic in admiration, for no better reason than that the doctrines of the two books were hateful to the ecclesiastics and destructive of the teaching of the Church.
But to this arrangement, which is explicable neither as the result of design nor of chance, the Nebular Hypothesis furnishes a clue. In his Exposition du Système du Monde, Laplace shows, by reasoning too detailed to be here repeated, that under the circumstances such a relation of movements would be likely to establish itself.
"Sixty may be divided by any divisor of ten or twelve. Of all numbers that could be chosen as an invariable denominator for fractions, it has most divisors." FR. LENORMANT, Manuel d'Histoire ancienne, vol. ii. p. 177, third edition. AURÈS, Sur le Système métrique assyrien, p. 16. LENORMANT, Manuel, &c. vol. ii. p. 177, third edition. Ibid. p. 37. LENORMANT, Manuel, vol. ii. pp. 175, 178, 180.
The "Systeme Glaciaire" was, on the contrary, an account of a connected plan of investigation during a succession of years, upon a single glacier, with its geodetic and topographic features, its hydrography, its internal structure, its atmospheric conditions, its rate of annual and diurnal progress, and its relations to surrounding glaciers.
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