by the brief and glorious career of Bichat, who died when he was
only one-and-thirty, but, like another Alexander, left a realm large enough for
many heirs. That great Frenchman first carried out the conception that living
bodies, fundamentally considered, are not associations of organs which can be
understood by studying them first apart, and then as it were federally; but must
be regarded as consisting of certain primary webs or tissues, out of which the
various organs - brain, heart, lungs, and so on - are compacted, as the various
accommodations of a house are built up in various proportions of wood, iron,
stone, brick, zinc, and the rest, each material having its peculiar composition
and proportions. No man, one sees, can understand and estimate the entire
structure or its parts - what are its frailties and what its repairs, without
knowing the nature of the materials. And the conception wrought out by Bichat,
with his detailed study of the different tissues, acted necessarily on medical
questions as the turning of gas-light would act on a dim, oil-lit street,
showing new connections and hitherto hidden facts of structure which must be
taken into account in considering the symptoms of maladies and the action of
medicaments. But results which depend on human conscience and intelligence work
slowly, and now at the end of 1829, most medical practice was still strutting or
shambling along the old paths, and there was still scientific work to be done
which might have seemed to be a direct sequence of Bichat's. This great seer did
not go beyond the consideration of the tissues as ultimate facts in the living
organism, marking the limit of anatomical analysis; but it was open to another
mind to say, have not these structures some common basis from which they have
all started, as your sarsnet, gauze, net, satin and velvet from the raw cocoon?
Here would be another light, as of oxy-hydrogen, showing the very grain of
things, and revising all former explanations. Of this sequence to Bichat's work,
already vibrating along many currents of the European mind, Lydgate was
enamoured; he longed to demonstrate the more intimate relations of living
structure, and help to define men's thought more accurately after the true
order. The work had not yet been done, but only prepared for those who knew how
to use the preparation. What was the primitive tissue? In that way Lydgate put
the question - not quite in the way required by the awaiting answer; but such
missing of the right word befalls many seekers. And