414 THE HISTORY OF BIOLOGY 



established once and for all that the same processes that take place in inor- 

 ganic nature exist also in the living organism — in other words, every vital 

 process has its purely physico-chemical progress. As usual, however, the 

 great advance thus made led to an overestimation of the possibilities thereby 

 opened up for science; the pioneers of experimental biology, as R. Tigerstedt 

 justly remarks, entirely overlooked the part played by the cell and its various 

 structural forms in the vital processes. They saw in the living body merely 

 the basis for simple physical and chemical processes and they overlooked the 

 extremely complex structures which represent the fundamental condition for 

 the operation of these forces and on account of which the phenomena of life 

 actually become infinitely more complex than the physiologists were pre- 

 pared to admit. As, later on, knowledge of the cell-structure increased, there 

 arose in connexion therewith a mistrust of the over-simplified idea of the 

 phenomena of life, which in certain quarters caused a return to that vitalis- 

 tic biology that exact physiology imagined it had disposed of for all time. 

 We shall shortly make the acquaintance of this so-called neo-vitalism. 



2.. Morphology and Classification 



As far as comparative anatomy and morphology are concerned, the period we 

 are now describing is one of transition, during which the remains of the old 

 natural-philosophical manner of viewing life appears side by side with ideas 

 produced by the great discoveries that have been recorded in the foregoing. 

 Besides this, we find in the research work of this era much that fore-shadows 

 the advent of the origin-of-species theory. A review of the most important 

 events in the morphological research work of this period will therefore 

 form a suitable transition to the great epoch-making discovery of the sixties. 

 Contemporary with J. Miiller in Germany there appeared in England 

 a comparative anatomist of more than ordinarily wide significance. Richard 

 Owen was born in 1804 at Lancaster, the son of a merchant. At school he 

 gave no special indication of genius and was therefore apprenticed to an 

 apothecary; then, after some years, he went to Edinburgh to study medi- 

 cine and there obtained his doctor's degree. Having established himself in 

 practice in London, he devoted his leisure hours to the study of anatomy and 

 as a result of his work on the subject, he became an amanuensis at the Hunter 

 Museum, and later, after the resignation of Charles Bell, he was appointed 

 its director. In i860 he was made head of the natural-science department of 

 the British Museum and carried out its removal to South Kensington. He 

 held his position for an extraordinary length of time; in his eightieth year 

 he resigned and after that lived for some years in retirement; after failing in 

 health for some time he died in 1891, 



