CHAPTER IV 



THE ENERGIES OF THE ORGANIC WORLD— THE 



.BIOTIC, THE COGNITIC, THE COGITIC— 



AND THEIR RELATION TO 



ORGANISMS 



As science from the times of Buffon, Lavoisier, Lamarck, 

 Goethe, Berzehus, Spencer, and Darmn began to shake itself 

 free from rehgious dogma, from the vagaries and errors of 

 alchemy, or from traditions of crude cosmogonies, observation, 

 experiment, collation of facts, and deductions therefrom were 

 increasingly accepted as necessary methods of study for the 

 extension of scientific knowledge. 



But in acquisition of such knowledge the physicist, the 

 chemist, the botanist, the zoologist, and the palaeontologist — 

 each concerned Tvith his own branch, or \^dth some small field 

 of it — has often failed to grasp the significance of discoveries 

 in one department that throw important light on another. 

 In the progress of chemistry, the successive discoveries of Ohm's 

 law, of Joule's, of Dalton's, of Bertholet's, of Richter's and 

 others, have given immense impetus to that science, that will 

 ever continue to bear fruit. 



But, when chemists began to compare purely inorganic 

 substances with those obtained from plants and animals, the 

 extreme complexity of the latter, and the apparent impossibility 

 of building them up after the manner that many inorganic 

 bodies had been, so impressed them that they spoke of these 

 substances as the "organic compounds." Further, while pur- 

 suing rigorous scientific methods most of the distinguished 

 chemists at the close of the Eighteenth and in the earlier part 

 of the Nineteenth Century claimed that there was or must be 

 a "vital force," while others in less explicit terms spoke of 

 "that mysterious thing called life." Others again accepted 



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