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Between biology and chemistry in the Enlightenment: how nutrition shapes vital organization. Buffon, Bonnet, C.F. Wolff

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Abstract

This paper seeks to characterize how the study of nutrition processes contributed to revisit the problem of vital organization in the late eighteenth century. It argues that focusing on nutrition leads to reformulate the problem of the relation between life and organization in terms of processes, rather than static or given structures. This nutrition-centered approach to life amounts to acknowledge the specific strategic role nutrition played in the development of a materialist approach to the generation of vital organization. The paper proposes a clarification of the multiple meanings of the concept of organization in the context of Enlightenment physiology and nascent biology, before focusing on the century long analogy between nutrition and generation. It shows how, by contrasting different uses of this analogy, nutrition was employed as a key vital phenomenon in the development of epigenetic theories of generation, i.e. how a nutritive modeling of generation was used in the undermining of preformationism. To this purpose I contrast two seemingly opposite theories of generation, Buffon’s and Bonnet’s, and show that despite the obvious metaphysical discontent, their views of generation share a common mechanical conceptual frame in which nutrition is conflated with growth and repair. I then turn to the role nutrition played in the epigenetic conception of generation in C. F. Wolff’s embryology and analyze this rival understanding of nutrition as an organizing process.

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Notes

  1. François Jacob’s history of biology, The Logic of life. A history of heredity 1970, 1973 is a good example of such an identification.

  2. See for example Kant (2000, 5: 371): “Second, a tree also generates itself as an individual. This sort of effect we call, of course, growth; but this is to be taken in such a way that it is entirely distinct from any other increase in magnitude in accordance with mechanical laws and is to be regarded as equivalent, although under another name, with generation. This plant first prepares the matter that it adds to itself with a quality peculiar to its species (…) and develops further itself by means of material which, as far as its composition is concerned, is its own product.”

  3. “In such a product of nature each part is conceived as if it exists only through all the other, thus as if existing for the sake of the other and on account of the whole, i.e., as an instrument (organ), which is, however not sufficient (for it could also be an instrument of art, and thus represented as possible at al only as an end); rather it must be thought of as an organ that produces the other parts (consequently each produces the other reciprocally), which cannot be the case in any instrument of art, but only of nature, which provides all the matter for instruments (even those of art): only then on that account can such a product, as an organized and self-organizing being, be called a natural end”, Kant (2000, 5: 374).

  4. Similar efforts to address the specific way living beings are organized and self-organize were made before Kant, especially in the so-called vitalist Montpellier Faculty of Medicine, as Charles Wolfe has shown, see for example Wolfe (2018), forth. Our goal here is not to focus solely on Kant’s conceptualization of organized beings as natural purposes, but rather to identify a common ground—not identical but not necessarily mutually incompatible—in the problematization of self-organization.

  5. Kant (2000, 5: 424). Zammito (2003).

  6. On the history of theories of generation see: Needham (1934), Roger (1993), Bowler (1971), Roe (1981), Wilson (1995), Pinto-Correia (1997), Smith (2006) and Nicoglou and Wolfe (2018). Shirley Roe for example defines epigenesis as the new production of an embryo “through gradual development from unorganized material”. Roe (1981, 1).

  7. See Roe (1981, pp. 120–121).

  8. On the distinction between preexistence and preformation see Roger (1993, pp. 325–326). According to the supporters of preformation, the product of generation (the germ, or the seed) contains the “fully formed or (…) preformed living entity that will emerge out of it”, so that embryonic development cannot be described as a formation, but must be understood as a “mere magnification of parts that already exist”. The doctrine of preexistence coincides only in part with that of preformation, because “like it, it asserts that the living being is not formed from an almost homogeneous material, germ or seed, but that it already exists entirely formed in this germ or seed, and that its “development” is only a magnification of its parts. But preexistence differs from preformation because, according to it, the germ is not produced by the progenitor, but was created by God with the rest of creation. The doctrine of preexistence therefore has much stronger epistemological and metaphysical implications than that of preformation. If preformation can be adapted to a mechanical or epigenetic explanation of the formation and organization of the germ in the progenitor, preexistence not only prohibits such an explanatory claim, but also seems powerless to conceive the possibility of modifications of the germs created by sexual reproduction (facts of heredity, hybridization, monsters).

  9. In the eighteenth century, Charles Bonnet is for example famous for having proposed a theory of the preexistence of the germ as a structural-functional unit containing a pattern of organization that had to be actualized through developmental processes allowing for some plasticity and epigenetic modifications, see Duchesneau (2012).

  10. See for example Jacob (1970, 1973) and Oyama (1985).

  11. We refer especially to Wolfe and Terada (2008), Wolfe (2017a, 2019) (under press).

  12. Lenoir (1989) and Wolfe (2016).

  13. Jacob (1970, 49).

  14. “(…) if biology was unknown there was a very simple reason for it: that life itself did not exist. All that existed was living beings, which were viewed through the grid of knowledge constituted by natural history”. Foucault (2002, 139).

  15. On the emergence of the term “biology” see McLaughlin (2002).

  16. Foucault (2002, 175).

  17. Foucault in Canguilhem (1991, p. 18).

  18. See for example Duchesneau (2012), Rey (2000), Huneman (2008), Wolfe (2017a), Bognon-Küss and Wolfe (2019).

  19. For an anti-reductionist account of Descartes’s physiology see Hutchins (2016).

  20. Wolfe (2016, p. 51).

  21. “1. Life is an organic phenomenon which gives rise to many others; this phenomenon results exclusively from the relations existing between the containing parts of the body, the contained fluids moving in them, and the exciting cause of the movements and changes there occurring; 2. Life in a body is an order and state of things which permits of organic movements, and these movements constituting active life result from the action of a cause which excites them”, Lamarck (1809, p. 210).

  22. Kant in the Critique of the Power of Judgment (Critique of the teleological power of judgment) famously argued that the regulatory use of the teleological principle was a necessary epistemic condition for the knowledge of vital entities characterized as natural purposes, i.e. bearing the mark of design, or teleology, without being caused and engendered by design. See Huneman (2007a, b, 2008).

  23. Salomon-Bayet (2008).

  24. Foucault (2002, 246).

  25. Ibid., 249.

  26. Zammito (2018, 2).

  27. See for example Huneman (2008), Wolfe (2010), Duchesneau (2012).

  28. For attempts to distinguish life from organization, see for example Buffon (1749, 296): “(…) the general division which we ought to make of matter seems to me to be in living and dead matter instead of organized and brute”; or Diderot, in a letter to Sophie Volland, oct. 15th 1759: “Supposing that placing one, two, or three dead particles next to another dead particle you will fabricate the system of a living body is, I conjecture, an absurd claim (…) Particle A placed at the left of particle B was not conscious of its existence, did not feel, was inert and dead; and now that the particle that was at the left is at the right, and that the particle that was at the right is at the left, the whole is alive, conscious, and sentient! That cannot be.”.

  29. Bordeu Recherches anatomiques sur la position des glandes, §CXXV; Ménuret “Observation” in Diderot et al. (1751), vol. XI, (1751, p. 313b–321). See Wolfe and Kleiman-Lafon forthcoming.

  30. The term was first used by Duchesneau (2012), see also Wolfe (2017a).

  31. On the model of “animal economy” in the Montpellier faculty of medicine see Wolfe and Terada (2008); on the relation between organization and “animal economy” see Wolfe (2017a, b, 2018). Wolfe (2018) defines the model of animal economy as “weak emergentism” in the sense that an organism is the necessary product of the interaction of the parts that compose it. It is a weak emergentism, rather than a strong one, because, in this model, the parts (the organs, each characterized as a “small life”—“petite vie”) are already alive, so that the emergent property is not separated (causally and/or epistemologically) from its physical basis.

  32. On the ambiguity of the concept of organization see Figlio (1976, 26): “(…) while these properties were precisely specified in a technical sense, they were obviously infused with all the shades of meaning attached to ideas of life. The investment of different meanings in the same terms resulted in a productive ambiguity, in that physiological work could proceed in an area burdened with paradox. Indeed, these physiological concepts, and perhaps most others as well, never were simple value-free elements of an emerging positivistic science, but were compromises between what was explicitly designated and what was implicitly carried along or excluded. It is, therefore, not surprising that the interpretation of these properties should vacillate between the two poles of mechanism, with the implication of materialism; and animism, with the implication of consciousness as the spring (…) of all activity; and that the controversies which raged through the life sciences might be seen as the result of the varied value-laden meanings implicitly invested in the explicit physiological vocabulary”.

  33. See for example Roger (1995), “Chimie et biologie”, pp. 252–271; Foucault (2002, p. 245), Rey (2000), Jacob (1970, pp. 87–145), Wolfe 2018.

  34. Duchesneau (2010, p. 47).

  35. Keller (2010 p. 10).

  36. If the patient philosophical elaboration of the concept of “organism” or “organized being” undoubtedly played a major role, as a unifying object, in sketching the framework of modern biology, in part because it stressed the necessity to acknowledge and naturalize teleological features proper to the development and functioning of living entities, I contend that over-emphasizing its importance leads to overestimate the role of teleological reasoning, and in particular the epistemic fecundity of a realistic account of vital forces, in the formation of biology. (See Gambarotto 2017 for such a reappraisal of vital forces in the formation of biology). On the contrary, I would like to focus on a competing trend that sought in the material interaction of the parts the condition for self-organization in living beings. Wolfe (2016, 2017b) insists on the importance of distinguishing between metaphysics of the organism—“biochauvinism”—that postulate “an organizing center, a subject, of quasi-transcendental status” (Wolfe 2015) and an emergentist conceptualization of organization, both vital and materialist.

  37. On the quantification of physiological functions, esp. the early quantification of ingesta and excreta by Sanctorius, see Santorio (1722), Bylebyl (1977); on later attempts to quantify nutrition, esp. the development of a “statique chimique animale” in the nineteenth century see for example a criticism in Bernard (1865, II, Chap. 2, §9).

  38. For example, in Bonnet’s system of preexistence.

  39. Hippocrates Regimen I, iv–vii; Aristotle De anima II, 4415b–25; On the generation of animals, 724a–725b.

  40. Walter Charleton (1659).

  41. Ibid., 2.

  42. Ibid., 3: “The whole fabric would be destroyed unless there were a continual renovation or reparation of these decays, by a substitution and assimilation of equivalent particles in the room of those dispersed.”.

  43. For a comprehensive study on the opposition between mechanical and chemical theories of digestion in the seventeenth century, see Clericuzio (2012); for the eighteenth century context, see Salomon-Bayet (2008, Chap. 9), Pépin (2012).

  44. A supporter of this view in the early eighteenth century was P. Hecquet. See Traité des dispenses du carême (1709), De la digestion des aliments, pour montrer qu’elle ne se fait pas au moyen d’un levain, mais par celui de la trituration ou du broyement (1710), De la digestion et des maladies de l’estomac suivant le système de la trituration et du broyement, sans l’aide des levains ou de la fermentation dont on fait voir l’impossibilité en santé et en maladie (1712).

  45. J. Astruc, Sur la cause de la digestion. Séance de la Société royale des Sciences de Montpellier (1711), Traité de la cause de la digestion, ou l'on refute le nouveau sistéme de trituration & du broïement. Et où l'on prouve que les alimens sont digerez & convertis en chile, par une veritable fermentation (1714).

  46. Astruc’s assumptions were clearly inspired by Van Helmont’s theory according to which digestion was to be understood as a transmutation of foodstuffs operated by vital principles, i.e. ferments. For a comprehensive study of Van Helmont’s chemistry and physiology see Pagel 1982, for an analysis of his theory of digestion see Clericuzio (2012).

  47. Astruc, (1714, 2–3, 46–47).

  48. Ibid., 48.

  49. Ibid, ch 7.

  50. The “integrative parts” (“parties intégrantes”) are the parts of the mixt that conserve the nature of the mixt when it is divided into parts, whereas the “principle parts” (“parties principes”) are the parts that enter into the composition of the “integrative parts”.

  51. Article “Ferment”, (Œconom. anim. Med.), in Diderot et al. (1751), vol. VI (1756), p. 516b–517b. On fermentation, see Rousseau and Porter (1980), Teich 1981, for a thorough study of the history of theories of fermentation see Fruton (2006).

  52. Ibid: “A grain of wheat sown in a very fertile soil, can produce one hundred grains of its kind; each of these can produce a hundred others, by the same virtue of fecundity; it follows that the first grain alone gives rise to a multiplication of ten thousand, each of which has the same qualities as that which has been its seed. Each has the same quantity of flour, the same disposition to form a very good food; yet, in the same soil, at the same time, among the plants of wheat, plants of a very different quality, such as those of tytimal, euphorbia, and mustard, have been produced. There is, then, something in the grain of wheat, which has the faculty of changing into a substance peculiar to it, the juice that the earth furnishes to it; if this faculty were missing, no new grain of wheat would be formed. This same juice, received in a different germ, would be changed into an entirely different substance, never into that of wheat: thus into a grain of this kind, the productive matter of which has not much more volume than a grain of sand, if it is stripped of its envelopes, of its cells, is contained this power, which transmutes the juice of the earth into ten thousand plants of wheat; therefore this power consists in converting into the substance proper to this kind of grain, a juice which is absolutely alien to it before transmutation.”.

  53. Ibid.

  54. Venel, Article “Digestion”, (Œconom. anim.), in Diderot et al. (1751), vol. IV (1754), p. 999a–1003a .

  55. For example Huneman (2008, no. 56, 461).

  56. Buffon op. cit. II p. 43; Bonnet (1762, Chaps. 2–3).

  57. Although it is usually said that the word “intussusception” was first coined by Bourguet 1729, (see for example Roger 1979, 1993; Duchesneau 2003; Cheung 2006; Schmitt 2014; Mensch 2015) the term “intussusception” is already quite common in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. On early occurrences of “intussusception”, especially in scholastic and mechanist contexts, see Bognon–Küss and Demarest, forthcoming. The concept however is clearly exposed, if not named properly, in Bourguet (1729) since he distinguishes between two kinds of growth: inorganic growth by the addition of matter to the surface (growth by juxtaposition), as in crystallization, and organic growth occurring through the “addition of molecules in all internal parts at the same time”. Buffon (1749) uses the same distinction: “This expansion cannot be made by the addition to the surfaces alone, but, on the contrary, by an intimate susception which penetrates the mass, and thus increases the size of the parts, without changing the form, from whence it is necessary that the matter which serves for this expansion should penetrate the internal part in all its dimensions…” See Buffon 1749, 42. Translation from Buffon, (1797, 298).

  58. On the similarities and dissimilarities between Bonnet and Buffon’s theories of generation, see Bowler (1973), Castellani (1972) and Cheung (2006).

  59. Rostand (1956), Roger (1993/1971, 1989), Castellani (1972), Bowler (1973), Schmitt (2019). For a recent, annotaded edition of Buffon's works, see Buffon (2007). 

  60. Inheriting from Rostand’s characterization of Buffon’s theory, Roger for instance holds that, while Buffon both refuses to endow his molecules with elementary psychic properties (as in Maupertuis’ system), and to conflate the living with the inorganic, the organic molecules represent a convenient intermediary. He sees nature in Buffon’s system twice ordered: first by the organic molecules that exclude the passage from the dead to the living, and second by the inner forms that ensures the order in the transmission of information throughout the generations. Roger (1993, 557).

  61. Buffon’s theory of generation has undergone major and substantial changes: for example, the last chapters of the same volume appear, if not in conflict with, at least disconnected from the first chapters since the concept of the “inner form” no longer plays any role in describing the successive phases of embryonic and organogenetic development. Schmitt (2019) interprets this lack of cohesion as an indication of diachrony: these later chapters would actually represent an earlier state of Buffon’s thinking on generation—probably a relic of the first theory developed in the 1730 s. These last chapters of the second volume of Natural History, which present a clearly more epigenetic point of view, seek in particular to account for the internal organization of organic molecules and avoid the concept of the “inner form”. Similarly, after 1765, Buffon seems to have reversed the initial hierarchy that controlled the morphogenetic relationships between the “inner form” and the “organic molecules” in order to focus on the organizing potential of the latter in the formation of species. See for instance Buffon 1765 and especially 1777 where Buffon introduces an even more radical view since he considers the possibility of an organizational activity of the organic molecules on raw materials, from which they would form new organic forms.

  62. More than the theory of preformation, Buffon is therefore opposed to the theory of the preexistence of germs. One possible source for this ambiguity resides in the fact that epigenesis does not only refer to the successive formation of the parts, but also to doctrines that mechanically explain the formation of organized bodies. We know that Buffon rejects this first definition of epigenesis, a term that does not appear in his pen: he thus rejects Harvey’s observations, which show a successive formation of the parts of the embryo. If Buffon is clearly a fierce opponent of the pre-existence of germs, and a promoter of spontaneous generations with Needham, his theory of generation—at least as developed in the second volume of Natural History (1749)—can only partially be described as epigenetic. On the other hand, it is in so far as it is presented as a mechanical explanation of the formation of organized beings that Buffon’s system can be described as epigenetic, and that it has been subjected to the fire of Bonnet’s criticism: Buffon thus postulates the contribution of both sexes in the production of the germ, which does not pre-exist in the female’s egg, since it is the combination of the molecules contained in the two seeds that produces the germ. Buffon therefore imagines the simultaneous production of an organism already formed, whose development would then only be an increase in size, and accepts as such one of the laws that must govern the generation according to Bonnet: the law of development. Since Buffon refuses the successive formation of the parts, his generation model seems to imply at least a minimal kind of preformation after fecundation. Finally, Bonnet’s definition of epigenesis shows that, according to him, it is less opposed to preformation than to the doctrine of the pre-existence of germs, since it contradicts the opinion that “organized bodies are formed from the beginning”, the beginning being here the creation of the world by God. However, this point is important because it leaves open the possibility for a theory of generation to be both preformationist and epigenetic, in the limited sense of germ formation by the combination of both seeds.

  63. Buffon (1749, p. 6). Translations are borrowed from Buffon (1797). For more detailed studies on Buffon, see Roger (1993 [1971]), Duchesneau (2012), Gayon ed. (1992), Reill (2005), Hoquet (2005), Schmitt (2005, 2014), Zammito (2018), Schmitt (2019).

  64. Buffon (1749, 31–32; 1797, 287–288). My emphasis.

  65. Roger (1995, 257).

  66. Buffon (1749, 39; 1797, 296).

  67. Buffon (1749, 17; 1797, 272).

  68. Buffon (1749, 39; 1797, 296): “The general division which we ought to make of matter seems to me to be in living and dead matter, instead of organized and brute; the brute is only that matter produced by the death of animals in vegetables”. Buffon characterizes brute matter as follows: “the mineral is a mere senseless and inactive matter, without organization, faculties, or power of reproduction; a dead mass”, Buffon (1749, 6; 1797, 260).

  69. For a more comprehensive study of Buffon’s conception of organism as organized structures of organic particles, see Demarest and Wolfe (2017), this special issue.

  70. On Leibniz’s theory of organism and his influence on Buffon, see for example Duchesneau (1998, 2018), Huneman and Rey (2007), Demarest and Wolfe (2017, this special issue).

  71. Buffon (1749, 19; 1797, 273–274). My emphasis. See also: “Animals and plants which can multiply by all their parts, are organized bodies, of which the primitive and constituting parts are also organic and similar, of which we discern the aggregate quantity, but cannot perceive the primitive parts only by reason and analogy”, Buffon (1749, 20; 1797, 274).

  72. Buffon (1749, 20; 1797, 279–280).

  73. Schmitt (2019).

  74. Buffon (1756, vol. 6, 88). Translation is mine.

  75. Buffon (1749, vol. 2, 425). Translation is mine.

  76. Organic molecules are not formed by the different parts of the body, but are absorbed by the body from the food. The process described by Buffon recalls how Aristotle explains the formation of sperm as a residue of the food, see Generation of animals, 724a–725b.

  77. Ibid.

  78. On the role of Newtonian analogies, see Hall (1968), Wolfe (2014) and Zammito (2018).

  79. Buffon (1749, 40; 1797, 297).

  80. Ibid.

  81. Ibid.

  82. Ibid.

  83. Buffon (1749, 43; 1797, 300).

  84. Buffon (1749, 41; 1797, 299).

  85. On Bonnet and Haller’s theories of preexistence see for example Gould (1977), Cherni (1998), Duchesneau (2012).

  86. Ibid.

  87. Buffon (1749, 46; 1797, 303).

  88. Buffon (1749, 48; 1797, 305).

  89. Buffon (1749, 48; 1797, 305).

  90. Buffon (1749, 44; 1797, 301).

  91. Buffon, Histoire naturelle, vol. 6, 1749–1767, 86–88.

  92. Buffon (1749–1767, vol. 6, 86–88): “(…) the organic molecules that make up the living substance of the deer antlers still retain the imprint of the plant, because they are arranged in the same way as in plants. (…) the stag, which lives only in the woods, and feeds only on the offspring of the trees, takes such a strong dye of wood that it produces itself a species of wood that preserves the characteristics of its origin sufficiently so that one cannot be mistaken”.

  93. Ibid. 89.

  94. Ibid. 88: “This organic matter that the animal assimilates into its body through nutrition is therefore not absolutely stripped of the form it had before, and it retains some characters from the imprint of its first state; it therefore acts itself through its own form on that of the organized body it feeds”.

  95. See Bowler (1973) and Schmitt (2019).

  96. Buffon (1749, 40). My translation.

  97. On this point see Schmitt (2019).

  98. Bonnet (1762, §35).

  99. In Bonnet’s system, the germ is not a simple miniature of the developed animal, but it is characterized as a net whose meshes can be stretched, elongated, contracted… according to various mechanical modalities (this structuring nevertheless taking place according to the articulation of the initial network). Thus the different parts of the animal are present in the germ, but in proportions and arrangements that differ from those they will have in the developed animal. Indeed, for Bonnet, development is not simply a magnification, but the evolution towards the opacity of a material that is initially transparent and therefore initially invisible. See Bonnet (1781, VII, Chap. 8).

  100. Bonnet (1762, §13, 7).

  101. Bonnet (1762, §36, 18).

  102. Haller, Mémoires sur les parties sensibles et irritables du corps animal (1756–1760).

  103. Bonnet (1769, 257). Translated by Cheung (2006, 28).

  104. Ibid. 258, translated by Cheung (2006, 28).

  105. Bonnet (1760, §101). Translated by Cheung (2006, 28).

  106. Bonnet (1762, I, 6, 79).

  107. Ibid., I, 6, 80.

  108. Ibid., I, 6, 79.

  109. Ibid., I, 6, 83; I, 3, 28.

  110. The similarities between Bonnet and Buffon have been noticed by Huxley and Darwin. See Darwin (1868, 375, no. 29): “Prof. Huxley has called my attention to the views of Buffon and Bonnet. The former ('Hist. Nat. Gén.,' edit. of 1749, tom. ii. pp. 54, 62, 329, 333, 420, 425) supposes that organic molecules exist in the food consumed by every living creature; and that these molecules are analogous in nature with the various organs by which they are absorbed. When the organs thus become fully developed, the molecules being no longer required collect and form buds or the sexual elements. If Buffon had assumed that his organic molecules had been formed by each separate unit throughout the body, his view and mine would have been closely similar”.

  111. Bonnet (1762, §333).

  112. Bonnet (1762, §90).

  113. Bonnet (1762, §83).

  114. Bonnet (1762, §237).

  115. De generatione animalium, 744b34.

  116. Huneman (2007a, b, 2008).

  117. C. F. Wolff (1764 [1759], 1768–1769).

  118. Huneman (2008, no. 56, 461).

  119. Réaumur (1756a, b), Venel op. cit.

  120. Diderot (1943), for an analysis of Diderot’s chemical interpretation of nutrition as the actualization of latent sensibility, see Pépin (2012). See also in "Appendix" section an excerpt from the Conversation.

  121. See for example Gambarotto (2017).

  122. Emphasis is mine. Kant (2000, 5: 374).

  123. Kant (2000, 5: 371).

  124. Buffon op cit., 24–25; 280.

  125. See Zammito (1992, 2003).

  126. Zammito (2003, 94).

  127. Kant (2000, 5: 424–425).

  128. Zammito (2003, 94).

  129. Ibid.

  130. On the relation between Kant and Wolff see Goy (2014) and Zammito (2019).

  131. Huneman (2007a, 75): “the Wolffian embryology (…) enabled Kant to resolve the philosophical problem of natural generation, and subsequently to determine what is proper to the explanation of living processes”, (2008, 127–136); Dupont (2007, 37–38): “even though it is to Blumenbach and not to Wolff that Kant refers (…) in the third Critique, Wolff’s embryological works do represent a condition of realizability of the Kantian project for the biology”.

  132. Zammito (2003, 2019), Goy (2014), see also Duchesneau (2012, 2006).

  133. McLaughlin (1982, 365).

  134. Zammito, op. cit.

  135. Zammito (2003, 87).

  136. Wolff (1764, 160). Cited in Roe (1981, 114).

  137. Blumenbach and Born (1789, ii–iii), quoted by Roe (1981, 115). Also translated in French in Grimaud’s dissertation on nutrition, 1789, 2.

  138. Wolff (1759, 115, §242). Cited in Roe (1981, 114).

  139. McLaughlin, op. cit., 365: “Wolffs wesentliche Kraft war eine chemische Attraktions—und Repulsions- kraft. Die Partikeln der Materie sind nicht nur verschieden gestaltet, sie haben verschiedene chemische Qualitaten und entsprechende Affinitaten. Die Materie ist also qualitativ heterogen.”.

  140. Zammito, op. cit.

  141. Duchesneau (2006, 173).

  142. Duchesneau, ibid.

  143. Duchesneau (2006, 2012).

  144. See Dupont (2007), about the treatise on the development of chick’s intestine, De Formatione Intestinorum, Wolff (2003).

  145. See Schmitt (2003).

  146. Wolff (1764, 247): “Wie ich hier die Verrichtung der Natur, durch welche die allerersten Theile einer Pflanze hervorgebracht werden, Conception nenne, so habe ich in meiner Dissertation diejenige Verrichtung, durch welche nach diesem ersten Theile andere mehrere vor sich bestehende Theile hervorgebracht zu werden fortfahren, Vegetation, diejenige aber, durch welche Gefäße und Zellen in diesen Theilen formiret werden, Nutrition genennt”.

  147. 272: “Wir können also die Conception definiren, sie sey eine von außen geschehene Nutrition, wobey nemlich das Nutriment unmittelbar an die Theile, die nutrirt werden sollen, gebracht wird.”

  148. 272: “Also unterscheidet sich die Conception von der gewöhnlichen Nutrition darin, daß das Nutriment nicht durch die gewöhnliche Wege, durch den ganzen Körper, und also von inwendig zu dem Orte der Nutrition, und den Theilen, die nutrirt werden sollen, sondern von außen, an dieselbe unmittelbar gebracht wird”.

  149. 274: “wenn ich aber in der Theorie der Conception den Saamen ein Nutriment nenne, so rede ich von seiner Würkung, und will also damit so viel sagen, er hat bey der Conception eben die Würkung, die die Nutrimente bey der Nutrition haben, oder er thut bey jener eben das, was diese bey der Nutrition thun”.

  150. See the manuscript Objecta meditationum etc. 1973, (Wolff 1973) on what he calls materia qualifacata, which deals with this issue and comments by Roe (1981).

  151. 274: “Weit gefehlt also, daß sie die Verrichtung und den Nutzen des Saamens in der Nutrition setzen sollten, so war er vielmehr in dieser Absicht betrachtet weiter nichts als eine geschickte Materie, aus welcher ein bestimmter organischer Körper formirt werden könnte; aber in eben dieser Absicht nenne ich ihn ein Nutriment und um die Entstehungsart des Saamens bekümmere ich mich nicht, denn diese ist in der Physiologie bekannt genug”.

  152. See for example Littré’s preface of the 1851 edition of Müller’s Handbuch der Physiologie.

  153. At the end of the eighteenth century, the so-called chemical revolution initiated by Lavoisier’s works on respiration, ended up in a chemical division of life in two reigns. See Lavoisier (1780, 1784).

  154. See for example Dumas and Boussingault (1842).

  155. See Bernard (1878, 382).

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Charles T. Wolfe for his careful reading of an earlier version of this paper. This paper is affectionately and respectfully dedicated to the memory of Jean Gayon, my professor (1949–2018). I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their insightful critiques and suggestions that greatly improved the manuscript. I must finally thank Staffan Müller-Wille for his confidence and support.

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Appendix: Excerpt from the conversation between Diderot and d’Alembert

Appendix: Excerpt from the conversation between Diderot and d’Alembert

  • D’ALEMBERT: Whatever resemblance there may be between the exterior form of the man and the statue, there is no connection between their internal organic structures. The chisel of the most expert sculptor can’t make even an epidermis. But there’s an extremely simple process for making latent energy transform itself to active energy. It’s an experiment which is repeated a hundred times a day right before our eyes; whereas, I don’t see how one can make a body move from a state of latent sensitivity into a state of active sensitivity.

  • DIDEROT: That’s because you don’t want to see it. The phenomenon is common enough.

  • D’ALEMBERT: Please tell me what this common enough phenomenon is.

  • DIDEROT: I’ll tell you because you don’t mind the shame of being told. It happens every time you eat.

  • D’ALEMBERT: Every time I eat!

  • DIDEROT: Yes, because when you’re eating, what are you doing? You’re removing the obstacles which stand in the way of the active sensitivity of what you’re eating. You assimilate the food into yourself. You make flesh out of it. You turn it into animal stuff. You make it capable of sensation. And what you do to food, I’ll do to marble whenever I like.

  • D’ALEMBERT: And how will you do that?

  • DIDEROT: How? I’ll make it edible.

  • D’ALEMBERT: Make marble edible—that doesn’t seem easy to me.

  • DIDEROT: It’s up to me to show you how it’s done. I take the statue which you see. I put it into a mortar and with some heavy blows with a pestle . . .

  • (…)

  • DIDEROT: When the block of marble has been reduced to a very fine powder, I mix this powder with some humus or topsoil. I knead them together well. I water the mixture and let it rot for a year, two years, a century—the time doesn’t matter. When it’s all been transformed into almost homogeneous matter, into humus, do you know what I do?

  • D’ALEMBERT: I’m sure you won’t be eating the humus.

  • DIDEROT: No, but there is a way of uniting that humus and myself, of appropriating it—a latus, as the chemist would say.

  • D’ALEMBERT: And this latus is a plant?

  • DIDEROT: Very good. I sow some peas, beans, cabbages, and other leguminous plants in it. The plants nourish themselves on the earth, and I nourish myself on the plants.

  • D’ALEMBERT: True or false, I like this transformation of marble into humus and of humus into the vegetable realm and of the vegetable realm into the animal realm, into flesh.

  • DIDEROT: In this way I make flesh or soul, as my daughter says—active, sensitive matter.

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Bognon-Küss, C. Between biology and chemistry in the Enlightenment: how nutrition shapes vital organization. Buffon, Bonnet, C.F. Wolff. HPLS 41, 11 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40656-019-0248-z

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