Richard F. Burton - "The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2"

Max Pearson Cushing - "Baron d'Holbach"

Benedetto Croce - "Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic"

George Sumner Weaver - "Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women"

Annual Bibliography of Commonwealth Literature 2007
This paper argues that discourses of love in Ghanaian market literature for youth offer a view into complex negotiations of agency and empowerment. Drawing on Deborah Durham's notion of youth as "social `shifters'" and Francis Nyamnjoh's conception of the "interconnectedness" of agency, I take Ghanaian market literature as one specific case of how African literature for youth foregrounds questions of continuity and change as African societies enter into increasingly complex global relations. In this literature for youth, received notions of love, often constructed out of impressions from American pop and hip hop music, carry new notions of agency that compete with existing "domesticated" forms. Authors like Ike Tandoh and Evelyn Tay employ discourses of love to offer youth alternative avenues for empowerment in a context of socio-economic disenfranchizement. In a creative process of "straddling", this writing both reveals and reproduces the contradictions that obtain in youth configurations of agency.

Form and Function

E >> E. S. (Edward Stuart) Russell >> Form and Function




In the 18th century, Reaumur and Bonnet continued the minute study of
insects, laying more stress, however, on their habits and physiology
than upon their anatomy. Lyonnet made a most laborious investigation
of the anatomy of the willow-caterpillar (1762). John Hunter (1728-93)
dissected all kinds of animals, from holothurians to whales. His
interest was, however, that of the physiologist, and he was not
specially interested in problems of form. It is interesting to note a
formulation in somewhat confused language of the recapitulation
theory. The passage occurs in his description of the drawings he made
to illustrate the development of the chick. It is quoted in full by
Owen (J. Hunter, _Observations on certain Parts of the Animal
OEconomy_, with Notes by Richard Owen. London, 1837. Preface, p.
xxvi). We give here the last and clearest sentence--"If we were to
take a series of animals from the more imperfect to the perfect, we
should probably find an imperfect animal corresponding with some stage
of the most perfect."

The tendency of the time was not towards morphology, but rather to
general natural history and to systematics, the latter under the
powerful influence of Linnaeus (1707-1778). The former tendency is
well represented by Reaumur (1683-1757) with his observations on
insects, the digestion of birds, the regeneration of the crayfish's
legs, and a hundred other matters. To this tendency belong also
Trembley's famous experiments on Hydra (1744), and Roesel von
Rosenhof's _Insektenbelustigungen_ (1746-1761).

Bonnet (1720-1793) deserves special mention here, since in his _Traite
d'Insectologie_ (1745), and more fully in his _Contemplation de la
Nature_ (1764), he gives the most complete expression to the idea of
the _Echelle des etres_.

This idea seems to have taken complete possession of his imagination.
He extends it to the universe. Every world has its own scale of
beings, and all the scales when joined together form but one, which
then contains all the possible orders of perfection. At the end of the
Preface to his _Traite_ _d'Insectologie_ (OEuvres, i., 1779) he
gives a long table, headed "Idee d'une Echelle des etres naturels,"
and rather resembling a ladder, on the rungs of which the following
names appear:--

MAN.
Orang-utan.
Ape.

QUADRUPEDS.
Flying squirrel.
Bat.
Ostrich.

BIRDS.
Aquatic birds.
Amphibious birds.
Flying Fish.

FISH.
Creeping fish.
Eels.
Water serpents.

SERPENTS.
Slugs.
Snails.

SHELL FISH.
Tube-worms.
Clothes-moths.

INSECTS.
Gall insects.
Taenia.
Polyps.
Sea Nettles.
Sensitive plant.

PLANTS.
Lichens.
Moulds.
Fungi, Agarics.
Truffles.
Corals, and Coralloids.
Lithophytes.
Asbestos.
Talcs, Gypsums.
Selenites, Slates.

STONES.
Figured stones.
Crystals.

SALTS.
Vitriols.

METALS.

HALF-METALS.

SULPHURS.
Bitumens.

EARTHS.
Pure earth.

WATER.

AIR.

FIRE.

More subtile matter.

The nature of the transitional forms which he inserts between his
principal classes show very clearly his entire lack of morphological
insight--the transitions are functional. The positions assigned to
clothes-moths and corals are very curious! The whole scheme, so
fantastic in its details, was largely influenced by Leibniz's
continuity philosophy, and is in no way an improvement on the older
and saner Aristotelian scheme.

Robinet, in the fifth volume of his book _De la nature_ (1761-6),
foreshadows the somewhat similar views of the German
transcendentalists. "All beings," he writes, "have been conceived and
formed on one single plan, of which they are the endlessly graduated
variations: this prototype is the human form, the metamorphoses of
which are to be considered as so many steps towards the most excellent
form of being."[23]

The idea of a gradation of beings appears also in Buffon (1707-1788),
but here it takes more definitely its true character as a functional
gradation.[24] "Since everything in Nature shades into everything
else," he says, "it is possible to establish a scale for judging of
the degrees of the intrinsic qualities of every animal."[25]

He is quite well aware that the groups of Invertebrates are different
in structural plan from the Vertebrates--"The animal kingdom includes
various animated beings, whose organisation is very different from our
own and from that of the animals whose body is similarly constructed
to ours."[26]

He limits himself to a consideration of the Vertebrates, deeming that
the economy of an oyster ought not to form part of his subject matter!
He has a clear perception of the unity of plan which reigns throughout
the vertebrate series.[27] What is new in Buffon is his interpretation
of the unity of plan. For the first time we find clearly expressed the
thought that unity of plan is to be explained by community of origin.

Buffon's utterances on this point are, as is well known, somewhat
vacillating. The famous passage, however, which occurs in his account
of the Ass shows pretty clearly that Buffon saw no theoretical
objection to the descent of all the varied species of animals from one
single form. Once admit, he argues, that within the bounds of a single
family one species may originate from the type species by
"degeneration," then one might reasonably suppose that from a single
being Nature could in time produce all the other organised beings.[28]
Elsewhere, _e.g._, in the discourse _De la Degeneration des
Animaux_,[29] Buffon expresses himself with more caution. He finds that
it is possible to reduce the two hundred species of quadrupeds which
he has described to quite a small number of families "from which it is
not impossible that all the rest are derived."[30] Within each of the
families the species branch off from a parent or type species. This we
may note is a great advance on the linear arrangement implied in the
idea of an _Echelle des etres_.[31]

It is a mistake to suppose that Buffon was par excellence a maker of
hypotheses. On the contrary he saw things very sanely and with a very
open mind. He expressly mentions the great difficulties which one
encounters in supposing that one species may arise from another by
"degeneration." How does it happen that two individuals "degenerate"
just in the right direction and to the right stage so as to be capable
of breeding together? How is it that one does not find intermediate
links between species? One is reminded of the objections, not
altogether without validity, which were made to the Darwinian theory
in its early days. I cannot agree with those who think that Buffon was
an out-and-out evolutionist, who concealed his opinions for fear of
the Church. No doubt he did trim his sails--the palpably insincere
"Mais non, il est certain, par la revelation, que tous les animaux ont
egalement participe a la grace de la creation,"[32] following hard upon
the too bold hypothesis of the origin of all species from a single
one, is proof of it. But he was too sane and matter-of-fact a thinker
to go much beyond his facts, and his evolution doctrine remained
always tentative. One thing, however, he was sure of, that evolution
would give a rational foundation to the classification which, almost
in spite of himself, he recognised in Nature. If, and only if, the
species of one family originated from a single type species, could
families, be founded rationally, _avec raison_.

Buffon was, curiously enough, rather unwilling to recognise any
systematic unit higher than the species. Strictly; speaking there are
only individuals in Nature; but there are also groups of individuals
which resemble one another from generation to generation and are able
to breed together. These are species--Buffon adheres to the genetic
definition of species--and the species is a much more definite unit
than the genus, the order, the class, which are not divisions imposed
by us upon Nature. Species are definitely discontinuous,[33] and this
is the only discontinuity which Nature shows us. Buffon put his views
into practice in his _Histoire Naturelle_, where he describes species
after species, never uniting them into larger groups. We have seen,
however, how the facts forced upon him the conception of the "family."

Buffon was no morphologist. He left to Daubenton what one might call
the "dirty work" of his book, the dissection and minute description of
the animals treated.

But Buffon was a man of genius, and accordingly his ideas on
morphology are fresh and illuminating. Few naturalists have been so
free from the prejudices and traditions of their trade. He makes in
the _Discours sur la Nature des Animaux_[34] a distinction, which
Bichat and Cuvier later developed with much profit, between the
"animal" and the "vegetative" part of animals.[35] The vegetative or
organic functions go on continuously, even in sleep, and are performed
by the internal organs, of which the heart is the central one. The
active waking life of the animal, that part of its life which
distinguishes it from the plant, involves the external parts--the
sense-organs and the extremities. An animal is, as it were, made up of
a complex of organs performing the vegetative functions, assimilation,
growth, and reproduction, surrounded by an envelope formed by the
limbs, the sense-organs, the nerves and the brain, which is the centre
of this "envelope."[36] Animals may differ from one another enormously
in the external parts, particularly in the appendicular skeleton,
without showing any great difference in the plan and arrangement of
their internal organs. Quadrupeds, Cetacea, birds, amphibians and fish
are as unlike as possible in external form and in the shape of their
limbs; but they all resemble one another in their internal organs. Let
the internal organs change, however--the external parts will change
infinitely more, and you will get another animal, an animal of a
totally different nature. Thus an insect has a most singular internal
economy, and, in consequence, you find it is in every point different
from any vertebrate animal.

In this contrast, on the whole justified, between the importance of
variations in the "vegetative" and variations in the "animal" parts,
one may see without doing violence to Buffon's thought, an indication
of the difference between homology and analogy. It is usually in the
external parts, in the organs by which the animal adapts itself to its
environment, that one meets with the greatest number of analogical
resemblances. This contrast of vegetative and animal parts and their
relative importance for the discovery of affinities was at any rate a
considerable step towards an analysis of the concept of unity of plan.

To Xavier Bichat (1771-1802) belongs the credit of working out in
detail the distinction drawn by Aristotle and Buffon between the
animal and the vegetative functions. Bichat was not a comparative
anatomist; his interest lay in human anatomy, normal and pathological.
So his views are drawn chiefly from the consideration of human
structure.

He classifies functions into those relating to the individual and
those relating to the species. The functions pertaining to the
individual may be divided into those of the animal and those of the
organic life.[37] "I call _animal life_ that order of functions which
connects us with surrounding bodies; signifying thereby that this
order belongs only to animals" (p. lxxviii.). Its organs are the
afferent and efferent nerves, the brain, the sense-organs and the
voluntary muscles; the brain is its central organ. "Digestion,
circulation, respiration, exhalation, absorption, secretion,
nutrition, calorification, or production of animal heat, compose
organic life, whose principal and central organ is the heart" (p.
lxxix.).

The contrast of the animal and the organic life runs through all
Bichat's work; it receives classical expression in his _Recherches
Physiologiques sur la Vie et la Mort_ (1800). The plant and the animal
stand for two different modes of living. The plant lives within
itself, and has with the external world only relations of nutrition;
the animal adds to this organic life a life of active relation with
surrounding things (3rd ed., 1805, p. 2). "One might almost say that
the plant is the framework, the foundation of the animal, and that to
form the animal it sufficed to cover this foundation with a system of
organs fitted to establish relations with the world outside. It
follows that the functions of the animal form two quite distinct
classes. One class consists in a continual succession of assimilation
and excretion; through these functions the animal incessantly
transforms into its own substance the molecules of surrounding bodies,
later to reject these molecules when they have become heterogeneous to
it. Through this first class of functions the animal exists only
within itself; through the other class it exists outside; it is an
inhabitant of the world, and not, like the plant, of the place which
saw its birth. The animal feels and perceives its surroundings,
reflects its sensations, moves of its own will under their influence,
and, as a rule, can communicate by its voice its desires and its
fears, its pleasures or its pains. I call organic life the sum of the
functions of the former class, for all organised creatures, plants or
animals, possess them to a more or less marked degree, and organised
structure is the sole condition necessary to their exercise. The
combined functions of the second class form the 'animal' life, so
named because it is the exclusive attribute of the animal kingdom"
(pp. 2-3).

In both lives there is a double movement, in the animal life from the
periphery to the centre and from the centre to the periphery, in the
organic life also from the exterior to the interior and back again,
but here a movement of composition and decomposition. As the brain
mediates between sensation and motion, so the vascular system is the
go-between of the organs of assimilation and the organs of
dissimilation.

The most essential structural difference between the organs of animal
life and the organs of organic life is in man and the higher animals
at least, the symmetry of the one set and the irregularity of the
other--compare the symmetry of the nerves and muscles of the animal
life with the asymmetrical disposition of the visceral muscles and the
sympathetic nerves, which belong to the organic life.

Noteworthy differences exist between the two lives with respect to the
influence of habit. Everything in the animal life is under the
dominion of habit. Habit dulls sensation, habit strengthens the
judgment. In the organic life, on the contrary, habit exercises no
influence. The difference comes out clearly in the development of the
individual. The organs of the organic life attain their full
perfection independently of use; the organs of the animal life require
an education, and without education they do not reach perfection
(_Loc. cit._, p. 127).

Bichat was the founder of what was known for a time as General
Anatomy--the study of the constituent tissues of the body in health
and disease. His classification of tissues was macroscopical and
physiological; he relied upon texture and function in distinguishing
them rather than upon microscopical structure. The tissues he
distinguished are as follows:--[38]

1. The cellular membrane.
2. Nerves of animal life.
3. Nerves of organic life.
4. Arteries.
5. Veins.
6. Exhalants.
7. Absorbents and glands.
8. Bones.
9. Medulla.
10. Cartilage.
11. Fibrous tissue.
12. Fibro-cartilage.
13. Muscles of organic life.
14. Muscles of animal life.
15. Mucous membrane.
16. Serous membrane.
17. Synovial membrane.
18. The Glands.
19. The Dermis.
20. Epidermis.
21. Cutis.

The "cellular membrane" seems to mean undifferentiated connective
tissue; "exhalants" are imperceptible tubes arising from the
capillaries and secreting fat, serum, marrow, etc.; the "absorbents
and glands" are the lymphatics and the lymphatic glands.

In Bichat's eyes this resolution of the organism into tissues had a
deeper significance than any separation into organs, for to each
tissue must be attributed a _vie propre_, an individual and peculiar
life. "When we study a function we must consider the complicated organ
which performs it in a general way; but if we would be instructed in
the properties and life of that organ we must absolutely resolve it
into its constituent parts."[39] The tissues have, too, a great
importance for pathology, for diseases are often diseases of tissues
rather than of organs.[40]

[9] _Le Monde vegetal_, p. 41, Paris, 1907.

[10] _Exercitationes de generatione animalium_,1651. For
an account of Harvey's work on generation and
development, see Em. Radl's masterly _Geschichte der
biologischen Theorien_, i., pp. 31-8, Leipzig, 1905.

[11] The passage runs:--"Sic natura perfecta et divina
nihil faciens frustra, nec quipiam animali cor addidit,
ubi non erat opus, neque priusquam esset ejus usus,
fecit; sed iisdem gradibus in formatione cujuscumque
animalis, transiens per omnium animalium constitutiones
(ut ita dicam) ovum, vermem, foetum, perfectionem in
singulis acquirit."

[12] See I. Geoffroy St Hilaire, _Essais de Zoologie
generale_, p. 71, Paris, 1841.

[13] M. Foster, _Lectures on the History of Physiology_,
Cambridge, p. 53, 1901.

[14] _Zootomia democritea_, Nuremberg, 1645;
_Antiperipatias, seu de respiratione piscium_,
Amsterdam, 1661.

[15] Radl, _loc. cit._, i., p. 50.

[16] Perrault et Duverney, _Memoires pour servir a
l'histoire des Animaux_, Paris, 1699.

[17] F. Houssay, _Nature et Sciences naturelles_, Paris,
p. 76, n.d.

[18] Foster, _loc. cit._, p. 85.

[19] Trans, by Foster, _loc. cit._, p. 113.

[20] He made a careful study of the silkworm.

[21] "Etenim, ferventi aetatis calore, Anatomica
aggressus, licet circa peculiaria fuerim solicitus, in
_perfectioribus_ tamen haec rimari sum ausus. Verum, cum
haec propriis tenebris obscura jaceant, simplicium
analogismo egent; inde _insectorum_ indago illico
arrisit; quae cum et ipsa suas habeat difficultates ad
Plantarum perquisitionem animum _postremo_ adjeci, ut
diu hoc lustrato mundo gressu retroacto Vegetantis
Naturae gradu, ad prima studia iter mihi aperirem. Sed
nec forte hoc ipsum sufficiet cum simplicior _Mineralium
Elementorumque_ mundus praeire debeat. At in immensum
excrescit opus, et meis viribus omnino impar," _Opera
Omnia_, i., p. 1, London, 1686.

[22] See particularly E. Radl, _loc. cit._. I Teil. J. V.
Carus, _Geschichte der Zoologie_, Muenchen, 1872.

[23] For a good historical account of the gradation
theories see Thienemann's paper in the _Zoologische
Annalen_(Wuerzburg) iii., pp. 185-274, 1910, from which
the quotation from Robinet is taken.

[24] _Histoire naturelle_, i., p. 13; ii, p. 9; iv., p.
101; and xiv., pp. 28-9, 1749 and later.

[25] No translation can render the beauty of the
original--"Comme tout se fait et que tout est par nuance
dans la Nature ..." (iv., p. 101).

[26] _Hist. nat._, iv., p. 5.

[27] See particularly his comparison of the skeleton of
the horse with that of man. _Hist. Nat._, iv., p. 381,
also p. 13.

[28] _Loc. cit._, p. 382.

[29] Tome xiv., pp. 311-374.

[30] Tome xiv., p. 358.

[31] See also "Oiseaux," Tome i., pp. 394, 395. Pallas in
1766 adopted for the whole animal kingdom this branching
arrangement.

[32] "But this cannot be, for it is certain by revelation
that all animals have equally participated in the grace
of creation."

[33] iv., p. 385.

[34] iv., pp. 3-110.

[35] It has been revived in our own days by Bergson,
_Matiere et Memoire_, p. 57.

[36] iv., pp. 7-15.

[37] _Anatomie Generale_, Paris, 1801, Eng. trans. 1824.

[38] _Anatomie Generale_, Eng. trans., i., p. lii.

[39] _Anatomie Generale_, Eng. trans., i., p. lviii.

[40] _Loc cit._, i., sect. vii.




CHAPTER III

CUVIER


Cuvier was perhaps the greatest of comparative anatomists; his work
is, in the best sense of the word, classical.

Like all his predecessors, like Aristotle, like the Italian
anatomists, Cuvier studied structure and function together, even gave
function the primacy.

Some functions, he says,[41] are common to all organised bodies--origin
by generation, growth by nutrition, end by death. There are also
secondary functions. Of these the most important, in animals at least,
are the faculties of feeling and moving. These two faculties are
necessarily bound up together; if Nature has given animals sensation
she must also have given them the power of movement, the power to flee
from what is harmful and draw near to what is good. These two
faculties determine all the others. A creature that feels and moves
requires a stomach to carry food in. Food requires instruments to
divide it, liquids to digest it. Plants, which do not feel and do not
move, have no need of a stomach, but have roots instead. Thus the
"Animal Functions" of feeling and moving determine the character of
the organs of the second order, the organs of digestion. These in
their turn are prior to the organs of circulation, which are a means
to the end of distributing the nutrient fluid or blood to all parts of
the body. These organs of the third order are not only dependent on
those of the second order, but are also not even necessary, for many
animals are without them. Only animals with a circulatory system can
have definite breathing organs--lungs or gills. Plants, and animals
without a circulation, breathe by their whole surface.

There is accordingly a rational order of functions, and therefore of
the systems of organs which perform them. The most important are the
Animal Functions, with their great organ-system, the neuro-muscular
mechanism. Then come the digestive functions, and after them, and in a
sense accessory to them, the functions and organs of circulation and
respiration. The last three may be grouped as the Vital Functions.

The Animal Functions not only determine the character of the Vital
Functions, but influence also the primary faculty of generation, for
animals' power of movement has rendered their mode of fecundation more
simple, has therefore had an effect on their organs of generation.

This division into "Animal" and "Vital" functions recalls Buffon's and
Bichat's distinction of the "animal" and the "vegetative" lives.
Cuvier apparently took this idea from Buffon, for he says that a plant
is an animal that sleeps.[42] But the idea is as old as Aristotle, who
discusses the "sleep" of embryos and of plants in the last book of the
_De Generatione animalium_. The distinction between animal and
vegetative life is, of course, based for Aristotle in the difference
between the [Greek: psyche aisthetike] and the [Greek: psyche
threptike]. Cuvier, like Aristotle, Buffon, and Bichat, makes the
heart the centre of the "vegetative" organs.

It is important to note that Cuvier puts function before structure,
and infers from function what the organ will be. "Plants," he writes,
"having few faculties, have a very simple organisation."[43] It is only
after having discussed and classified functions that Cuvier goes on to
examine organs.

First his views on the composition of the animal body. Aristotle
distinguished three degrees of composition--the "elements," the
homogeneous parts, and the heterogeneous parts or organs. Cuvier does
the same. Some small advance has been made in the two thousand years'
interval, due in the first place to the progress of chemistry, and in
the second to the invention of the microscope. To the first
circumstance Cuvier owes his knowledge that the inorganic substances
forming the first degree of composition are principally C, N, H, O,
and P, combined to form albumen, fibrine, and the like, which are in
their turn combined to form the solids and fluids of the body. To the
latter circumstance Cuvier owes the statement that the finest
fragments into which mechanical division can resolve the organism are
little flakes and filaments, which, joined up loosely together, form a
"cellulosity." The discovery of the true cellular nature of animal
tissues did not come till much later, till some years after Cuvier's
death in 1832. Knowledge of histological detail was, however,
considerable by the beginning of the 19th century. Cuvier knew, for
example, that each muscle fibre has its own nerve fibre. But he gives
no elaborate account of the homogeneous parts, no detailed histology.
On the other hand his treatment of the heterogeneous parts or organs
is detailed and masterly.[44]

The main systems of organs are, in order of importance, the nervous
and muscular, the digestive, the circulatory, and the respiratory.
Each organ or system of organs may have many forms. If any form of any
organ could exist in combination with any form of all the others there
would be an enormous number of combinations theoretically possible.
But these combinations do not all exist in Nature, for organs are not
merely assembled (_rapproche's_), but act upon one another, and act
all together for a common end. Accordingly only the combinations that
fulfil these conditions exist in Nature. Cuvier thus dismisses the
question of a science of possible organic forms and considers only the
forms or combinations actually existing. This question of the
possibility of a "theoretical" morphology of living things, after the
fashion of the morphology of crystals with their sixteen possible
types, was raised in later years by K. G. Carus, Bronn, and Haeckel.

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