THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT IN GERMANY. 217 



country possessed the necessary conditions and extensive 

 organisations, the habits of combined study and patient 

 co-operation, the large views and the high aims, which 

 had been acquired at the German universities under the 

 guidance of the German ideal of Wissenschaft, and under 

 the sway of the philosophical and classical spirit. 



A great authority, 1 who as much as any one represents 

 the modern as distinguished from the earlier views in 

 biological science, reviewing the different agencies which 

 have brought about the great change, speaks thus. He 

 is referring to Johannes Mliller, the father of modern ss. 

 physiology. " The modern physiological school," he says, Reymond 

 " with Schwann at its head, has drawn the conclusions for 

 which Mliller had furnished the premises. It has herein 

 been essentially aided by three achievements which Miiller 

 witnessed at an age when deeply-seated convictions are 

 not easily abandoned. I mean, first of all, Schleiden and 

 Schwann's discovery, that bodies of both animals and 

 plants are composed of structures which develop inde- 

 pendently, though according to a common principle. This 

 conception dispelled from the region of plant-life the idea 

 of a governing entelechy, as Miiller conceived it, and 

 pointed from afar to the possibility of an explanation of 

 these processes by means of the general properties of 

 matter. I refer, secondly, to the more intimate know- 

 ledge of the action of nerves and muscles, which began 

 with Schwann's researches, in which he showed how the 

 force of the muscle changes with its contraction. In- 

 vestigations which were carried on with all the resources 



1 See Du Bois-Reymond, 'Reden,' vol. ii. p. 219, &c. 



