CHAPTER VIII 



THE CONTINUED DEVELOPMENT OF BIOLOGY UNTIL 

 THE ADVENT OF DARWINISM 



I . Experimental Rearch Work 



Development of organic chemistry 



WHILE BIOLOGICAL RESEARCH was yielding the abundant results which 

 have been described above, it was subject to very important in- 

 fluences from other natural sciences in two special spheres. We 

 have described how, thanks to Berzelius, chemistry had extended its inquiries 

 to the sphere of living beings, and how an immense number of substances of 

 quite a peculiar kind were analysed and described. These substances, which 

 nowhere exist in inanimate nature and might consequently appear exclusively 

 to have "life" to thank for their origin, were called organic associations; 

 their existence was considered to be one of the most palpable proofs that 

 life itself was in its essence utterly distinct from the phenomena that take 

 place in inanimate nature, and even independent of the chemical and phys- 

 ical laws that govern lifeless matter. Organic chemistry thus became, the 

 more it developed, the strongest support for the theory of a special life- 

 force as the essential precondition for all that takes place in animate nature. 

 The theories maintaining this force therefore gained ground amongst an ever- 

 increasing number of biologists; as we have seen, Johannes Miiller embraced 

 a theory of this nature, as also did many of his school, and even a scientist 

 like Magendie, opposed to speculation though he was, could not help ac- 

 knowledging the invalidity of the ordinary chemical laws when applied to 

 living nature. It was in these circumstances that Wohler made his great con- 

 tribution to natural science. 



Friedrich Wohler was born in 1800 near Frankfurt am Main; he be- 

 came a doctor, but after taking his degree he devoted himself entirely to 

 chemistry. In order to obtain the best training available at the time he went 

 to Berzelius and worked in his laboratory for a year under the strict control 

 of the master. Having returned home, he became a teacher at a Geiverbe- 

 schule in Berlin and eventually professor at Gottingen, where he died in i88i. 

 He was a very distinguished student of chemistry, but his other activities 

 are overshadowed by his synthesis of urea out of cyanammonium. By this 



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