312 MAGNALIA NATUR/E: OR THE GREATER 



But in the history of modern science, or of modern physi- 

 ology, it is of course to Descartes, that we trace the origin 

 of our mechanical hypotheses, to Descartes, who, imitating 

 Archimedes, said ' Give me matter and motion, and I will 

 construct the universe.' In fact, leaving the more shadowy 

 past alone, we may say that it is since Descartes watched the 

 fountains in the garden, and saw the likeness between their 

 machinery of pumps and pipes and reservoirs to the organs 

 of the circulation of the blood, and since Vaucanson's 

 marvellous automata lent plausibility to the idea of a ' living 

 automaton,' it is since then that men's minds have been per- 

 petually swayed by one or other of the two conflicting ten- 

 dencies, either to seek an explanation of the phenomena of 

 living things in physical and mechanical considerations, or to 

 attribute them to unknown and mysterious causes, alien to 

 physics, and peculiarly concomitant with Life. And some 

 men's temperaments, training, and even avocations, render 

 them more prone to the one side of this unending contro- 

 versy, as the minds of other men are naturally more open to 

 the other. As Kiihne said a few years ago at Cambridge, the 

 physiologists have been found for several generations leaning 

 on the whole to the mechanical or physico-chemical hypo- 

 thesis, while the zoologists have been very generally on the 

 side of the Vitalists. 



The very fact that the physiologists were trained in the 

 school of physics, and the fact that the zoologists and botanists 

 relied for so many years upon the vague undefined force of 

 ' heredity ' as sufficiently accounting for the development of 

 the organism, an intrinsic force whose results could be studied 

 but whose nature seemed remote from possible analysis or 

 explanation, these facts alone go far to illustrate and to 

 justify what Kiihne said. 



Claude Bernard held that mechanical, physical and 

 chemical forces summed up all with which the physiologist 

 has to deal. Verworn denned physiology as ' the chemistry 



