THE PLACE OF BIOLOGY. 27 



him blue and faint, and revive with oxygen, though 

 after this he felt he had had enough of Pike's Peak, 

 and made a sudden bolt for a car which was just starting 

 downwards. 



The case of oxygen secretion has a far wider interest 

 than those of practical medicine, and I must now try 

 to follow this wider interest. At present there are 

 two very different views as to the aims and tendencies 

 of biological investigation. The first view, which the 

 present generation of biologists has inherited from the 

 leaders of the immediately preceding generation, is the 

 mechanistic one, that life is, in ultimate analysis, a 

 physical and chemical process, and is thus only capable 

 of being understood in terms of the physical and 

 chemical conceptions through which we interpret in- 

 organic phenomena. The second view is that life can 

 only be understood and successfully investigated by 

 means of conceptions derived from the study of life 

 itself. For a recent re-statement of the first view I 

 may perhaps refer to Sir Edward Schafer's Presidential 

 Address to the British Association in 1912, though I 

 confess at once to standing here as an uncompromising 

 upholder of the second view. According to the first 

 view, biology is only a department of applied physics 

 and chemistry. I wish to claim for biology that " place 

 in the sun " to which it seems to me that she is entitled 

 as an independent science. 



The fact of oxygen secretion is one among many 

 facts, all of which tend to show that from the physical 

 and chemical standpoint the functional activities of a 

 living organism are very far from being the comparatively 

 simple processes which they were formerly believed to 



