GKOWTH OF BIOLOGY IN THE NINETEENTH CENTUKY. 475 



biology of the new century will victoriously break its way is that 

 the mechanistic dogma that life, with all its complex phenomena, is 

 nothing- at all but a chemo-physical problem is as groundless as vital- 

 ism; groundless, at least, so long as one does not understand by physics 

 and chemistry sciences of quite other nature than those which in their 

 purport and their scope from the point of view of their historical 

 development now present themselves. For, as I remarked upon 

 another occasion, "If the problem of the chemist is to investigate the 

 numberless combinations of different kinds of atoms to form molecules, 

 he can, in strictness, not touch upon the problem of life, for this 

 begins where his inquiry ends. Over the structure of the chemical 

 molecule rises the structure of the living su])stance as a broader and 

 higher kind of organization. Over the structure of the cell rises again 

 the structure of plants and animals, which exhibit the yet more com- 

 plicated, elaborate combinations of millions and milliards of cells coor- 

 dinated and differentiated in the most extremely various wa3^s." 



What has chemical science, as it now is, to do with this entireh^ new 

 world of organizations of matter, upon Avhich the first manifestations 

 of life depend ? If the chemist wishes to set himself to the task of 

 investigating these, the first thing he has to do is to become a biologist, 

 and especially a morphologist. But then his methods and his aim must 

 be very different from what they are, and far more comprehensive. 



As for physics, it stands in precisely the same relation to biology 

 that chemistry does. At present the physiological [physical^] school 

 commonly argues with Du Bois-Reymond thus: In the living being, in 

 the cell, no other forces are efficient than those which the atoms of the 

 cell — carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus, etc. — have dis- 

 played outside of the cell. "A particle of iron is and remains the very 

 same sort of thing whether it flies through the solar system (Weltkreis) 

 in the meteorite or dashes along upon the rim of the locomotive wheel 

 or trickles in a blood cell through the temples of a bard. As little as 

 in the mechanism of the human hand is there in the last case anything 

 added to the properties of the particle or anything subtracted from 

 them. Those properties are eternal. They are inalienable, untrans- 

 ferable." "But if the atoms have developed no new forces, every- 

 thing of the physico-chemical kind will happen in the cell precisely as 

 it would in a test tube." 



That is the way the argument runs for the standpoint of '• every- 

 thing in the world is chemistry and physics." But our reply is that 

 the word "atom" is merely a fiction useful for science in its present 

 condition; that we know nothing of the sum of the properties and 

 forces in an "atom in itself," and still less how from the properties 

 and forces of different kinds of atoms we are to pass to the properties 

 and forces of their compounds. That from the properties of carbon, 

 combined with those of oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, etc.. in certam 

 proportions, albumen must result, is a fact as inconceivable m its 



