72 



PROGRESS OF SCIENCE 



respectively at Cambridge, and at London and 

 Oxford. On the far-reaching effects of physiological 

 research upon medicine and surgery as illustrated 

 by the work of Sir James Simpson, Edward Jenner, 

 and Lord Lister it is unnecessary to enlarge. But 

 the evolution of the science generally was very 

 clearly pointed out by Burdon-Sanderson in his 

 presidential address in 1893, from which, mainly in 

 his own words, the following account is summarised. 

 Just as there was no true philosophy of living nature 

 until Darwin (he said), we may with almost equal 

 truth say that physiology did not exist as a science 

 before Johannes Miiller, who taught in Berlin from 

 1833 to 1857. Miiller himself, in common with all 

 the biological teachers of his time, was a vitalist, 

 i.e., he regarded what was then called the vis vitalis 

 as something capable of being correlated with the 

 physical forces, and as a necessary consequence held 

 that phenomena should be classified or distinguished, 

 according to the forces which produced them, as 

 vital or physical, and that all these processes that 

 is groups or series of phenomena in living organisms 

 for which no obvious physical explanation could be 

 found, were sufficiently explained when they were 

 stated to be dependent on so-called vital laws. But 

 times were changing, and Mil Her 's successors were 

 adherents of what has been very inadequately 

 designated the mechanistic view of the phenomena 

 of life. The change thus brought about just before 

 the middle of the century was a revolution. It was 

 not a substitution of one point of view for another, 

 but simply a frank abandonment of theory for fact, 

 of speculation for experiment. Great discoveries 

 as to the structure of plants and animals had been 



