840 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



organism in the general forms of disease. Thus, I meant to build up 

 a theory of the essentiality of disease. Specific causes were mentioned 

 only as examples for instance, intoxication ; and, though but briefly 

 alluded to, parasites have not been entirely overlooked." 



His attitude toward Darwinism has been likewise misapprehended. 

 Far from being an opponent of Darwinism, he should be regarded as 

 one of its forerunners, for, as early as 1849, in his "Movement in 

 Favor of Unity in Scientific Medicine," he spoke of the origin of life 

 as a mechanical necessity ; and in 1858, a year before the publication 

 of Darwin's " Origin of Species," he pointed, in an oration which was 

 afterward printed in 1862, with three other orations on "Life" and 

 " Disease," to the changeability and transmutability of species as a 

 necessary basis for the mechanical theory of life. But, when Haeckel 

 insisted upon the inclusion of the theories of natural selection among 

 the subjects to be taught in the public elementary schools, Virchow 

 objected that only established facts and results, not theories, should 

 be taught in the public schools. 



To Haeckel's contradictions of religious faith Virchow is able to 

 return a tacit answer, by adhering to what he wrote more than thirty 

 years ago, that " faith does not admit of a scientific discussion, for 

 science and faith exclude each other. Not to such an extent, however, 

 that one of them renders the other an impossibility, but in such a way 

 that, within the range of science, there is no place for faith ; and the 

 latter can commence only where the former ends. It need not be 

 denied that, if this boundary -line be respected, faith may have actual 

 objects. It is not, therefore, the domain of science to attack faith or 

 its objects ; but its duty is to mark and consolidate the present ter- 

 mination of knowledge." 



Among the earlier papers written by Virchow and published in his 

 first collections were some on different features and diseases of the 

 skull and brain. These were followed by other cranial studies, and 

 thus the physician was led to the study of anthropology, archaeology, 

 and paleontology. He was one of the founders of the German Archa3- 

 ological Society, which was organized at the meeting of the German 

 naturalists at Innspriick in 1869, and he became the president of the 

 society in 1870. He has also been the leader of the Berlin Anthro- 

 pological Society since 1869, and has himself undertaken extensive and 

 important researches. Having become engaged in a controversy with 

 Quatrefages respecting the origin of the Prussian race (Quatrefages 

 maintaining that it was of Finnic descent), he instituted those inves- 

 tigations, among the school-children of Germany, into the relative 

 prevalence of blondes and brunettes, which have proved very interest- 

 ing in their progress and results, and which have been taken up in 

 other states. As a member of the Academy of Sciences, to which he 

 was elected in 1873, he read important anthropological papers in 1875 

 and 1876 ; and in the latter year delivered an address at the meeting 



