This explains the enthusiasm that Bichat and his disciples immediately felt for the discovery of pathological anatomy: it was not that they rediscovered Morgagni beyond Pinel or Cabanis; they rediscovered analysis in the body itself; they revealed, in depth, the order of the surfaces of things; they de fined for disease a system of analytical classes in which the element of pathological decomposition was the principle of generalization of morbid species.