CARL LUDWIG. 331 



phenomena due to the organ itself. Even when an organ 

 was subjected, for the sake of investigation, to conditions 

 not normally existing in the body, the tissues, if they reacted 

 at all, could only react in virtue of their cellular life. This 

 method therefore also benefits pathology in a great measure. 

 Ludwig had an especial liking for this method. 



Time was when anatomy and physiology were invariably 

 housed together, and the latter stood to the former in the 

 relation of a servant. No doubt anatomy is the basis of all 

 sound physiological research, but the fetters which chained 

 the younger to the elder science had to be loosed to make 

 its free development possible. It was in the middle of this 

 century that Ludwig together with Du Bois Reymond and 

 Helmholtz sought to give physiology the character of a 

 mechanical science, and thenceforth to physics and chemistry 

 were assigned the leading parts. The adherents of the older 

 morphological method in biology saw with dissatisfaction 

 this new departure, and the feuds between Ludwig and 

 Rudolf Wao-ner stand out as historic memorials of those 

 days. This antagonism has remained in a certain degree 

 to the present day ; the adherents of morphology who have 

 taken advantage of the theory of evolution and glorying in 

 its recent extraordinary development not seldom reproach 

 the Ludwig school with disregarding the morphological prin- 

 ciples of animal organisation. But it was quite erroneous 

 to believe that Ludwig ever relinquished the sure founda- 

 tion of anatomy. The contrary rather is true, as might be 

 expected of a man who began his career as a teacher of 

 anatomy. The manner in which he differed from pre- 

 vious as from later anatomists has been his new concep- 

 tion of the task of anatomy in relation to physiology. Here 

 he enriched the latter science with a third innovation of 

 method. He started a physiological or, as I should like to 

 call it, a mechanical anatomy. The structure of the tissues 

 and of the organs of the animal body interested him in so far 

 as by their exact description was rendered visible the solu- 

 tion of mechanical problems offered by it. Not the breaking 

 up of a machine into any arbitrary number of infinitesimal 

 particles, not a seeking after the probable origin of the 



