Vital dynamics : the Hunterian oration before the Royal College of Surgeons in London, 14th February 1840 / by Joseph Henry Green.

  • Green, Joseph Henry, 1791-1863.
Date:
1840
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Vital dynamics : the Hunterian oration before the Royal College of Surgeons in London, 14th February 1840 / by Joseph Henry Green. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.

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    exists of using external Nature as an alien, of using what it neither assimilates nor admits, this is more than independence, it is sove- reignty. In applying these rules to the higher animals, to all namely in which the three powers or functions of life, reproduction, irrita- bility and sensibility, not only co-exist but co- exist in a subordination of the former two to the third, we shall soon be reminded of a truth to which I directed your attention in a previous Lecture, the existence, namely, of a variety of classes evidently not essential to the system of nature in the Idea, but to be explained as parts of a process hereafter to disappear, and consequently arising from the absence of some other result hereafter to come, or if come, yet from its imperfection and immaturity incapable of exerting its appropriate influences. And here it is that we are met by the principle of variety, or the tendency to multiplication of forms, to which comparative anatomists of the greatest celebrity so often appeal in the lower orders, the zoophytes, mollusca, and in- sects, but without explaining the fact by any higher principle;—this same principle, but in a more intelligible form, again presents itself in this last stage of our investigation ; and I venture to assert that it admits of no other explanation than in one or other of the two following modes, or perhaps in both conjointly. The first we have already described under the