870 BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES AND MEDICINE XIV 



tion this doctrine has proved in the hands of the 

 man of genius to whom its development is due, 

 and who would probably be the last to forget that 

 abnormal conditions of the co-ordinative and 

 distributive machinery of the body are no less 

 important factors of disease. 



Henceforward, as it appears to me, the connec- 

 tion of medicine with the biological sciences is 

 clearly indicated. Pure pathology is that branch of 

 biology which defines the particular perturbation 

 of cell-life, or of the co-ordinating machinery, or of 

 both, on which the phenomena of disease depend. 



Those who are conversant with the present 

 state of biology will hardly hesitate to admit that 

 the conception of the life of one of the higher 

 animals as the summation of the lives of a cell 

 aggregate, brought into harmonious action by a 

 co-ordinative machinery formed by some of these 

 cells, constitutes a permanent acquisition of 

 physiological science. But the last form of the 

 battle between the animistic and the physical 

 views of life is seen in the contention whether the 

 physical analysis of vital phenomena can be carried 

 beyond this point or not. 



There are some to whom living protoplasm is 

 a substance, even such as Harvey conceived the 

 blood to be, " summa cum providentia et intellectu 

 in finem certum agens, quasi ratiocinio quodam ; " 

 and who look with as little favour as Bichat did, 

 upon any attempt to apply the principles and the 

 methods of physics and chemistry to the 



