PRESIDENT’S ADDRESS. 407 
That this is a sufficient statement of Schwanns point of view 
will be seen from the following quotation, p. 187 :—‘“ The other 
view (that is, the mechanical espoused by Schwann) is, that the 
fundamental powers of organised bodies agree essentially with 
those of inorganic nature, that they work altogether blindly accord- 
ing to laws of necessity and irrespective of any purpose, that they 
are powers which are as much established with the existence of 
matter as the physical powers are. It might be assumed that the 
powers which form organised bodies do not appear at all in 
inorganic nature, because this or that particular combination of 
molecules, by which the powers are elicited, does not occur in 
inorganic nature, and yet they might not be essentially distinct 
from physical and chemical powers.” Schwann points out that 
teleological views of nature used to be common in physics, such 
as the ‘ horror vacui,” but have long since been discarded, and he 
is of opinion that there is no necessity for admitting the teleological 
view in the case of organised bodies. 
I have dealt thus with Schwann’s views, because I wish to show 
that the regarding of the phenomena of biology from the point of 
view of mechanism was most definitely advanced by him. Pro- 
fessor Burdon Sanderson in his address to the British Association 
in 1889 makes no mention of Schwann, but after briefly reviewing 
the later work of Mayer upon the relation between the work done 
and heat given out by muscle and the chemical changes occurring 
in the muscle, published in 1845, and the subsequent rapidly fol- 
lowing discoveries of Ludwig upon the mechanics of the circu- 
lation, du Bois Reymond on the electrical proportions of nerve 
and muscle, and Helmholtz upon colour vision, says: “The effect 
of these discoveries was to produce a complete revolution in the 
ways of thinking and speaking about the phenomena of life.” 
There is not the slightest doubt that the brilliant discoveries of all 
these men immensely contributed to change the point of view, 
because they showed magnificent results obtained by attacking the 
problems of physiology from this side, whereas Schwann in the 
** Microscopical Researches” merely advocated it. 
We will now turn to the bearing of the views put forward in 
the “ Microscopical Researches” upon the separation of anatomy 
and physiology which occurred soon after. 
Schwann’s theoretical conceptions could not possibly meet with 
sympathy from the anatomists, with whom the ideas of homology 
and adaptation to function were leading principles. To the 
student of form and structure, the view that biological activities 
were regulated “blindly according to laws of necessity, and 
irrespective of any purpose,” appeared just so much nonsense. 
It was impossible to regard the variation in form of homologous 
structures, such as the wing of a bird and the fore-limb cf a mammal, 
irrespective of adaptation to the functions of flying or walking. 
