PRESENT TENDENCIES OF MORPHOLOGY 259 



In conceding to the sciences of nature the power to predict facts, 

 Claude Bernard gave them, at least in appearance, a very wide 

 range; for what constitutes the essence of a science, as had been 

 recognized already by Locke, is prevision of the future, and one 

 may repeat with W. Ostwald, "The greatest leaders of man have 

 been those who saw most clearly into the future." 1 



But if we seek to understand better the thought of the great 

 French physiologist, we soon realize that the role of contemplative 

 observer attributed by him to the morphologist is very modest 

 in comparison with the far more exalted part which he proposes 

 to reserve for the sciences called experimental or nature-conquer- 

 ing. 



It is to these the duty comes at the same time to foresee the 

 events at will and to create them at need: for the observer con- 

 siders phenomena in the state in which nature offers them to him; 

 the experimenter causes them to appear under the condition of 

 which he is master. The naturalist is a describer; the physiologist 

 is a creator. 



Debatable at the time it was advanced, and, in fact, soon debated 

 by men of great ability, the division of the sciences proposed by 

 Claude Bernard was not able to resist the progress of ideas, so rapid 

 at the close of the nineteenth century. 



It rested in great part upon a misunderstanding of the conception 

 of the word experience, to which we saw fit to give, as we shall see 

 later on, a less restricted significance than that of the school of 

 Magendie and of certain physiologists to-day. 



Furthermore, to those who may desire to see in this discussion 

 something besides a question of a word and a change of labels, it 

 will be easy to reply directly by the history of the conquests due 

 to morphological studies since the middle of the last century. 



Especially in the new and so little known domain of cytology 

 can it not be said that all that we know concerning the fundamental 

 question of cell-division is the fruit of the efforts of the morpho- 

 logists, that the methods employed by the histologists to elucidate 

 the problem of cell-division go far beyond simple observation, and 

 that they have required as much persevering ingenuity, as much 

 technical skill and accessory knowledge, as any experiment in pure 

 physiology involves? 



The triumph of the doctrines of Lamarck and Darwin, the splen- 

 did intellectual movement aroused even as early as 1857 by the 

 publication of the Origin of Species, the controversies of all sorts 

 aroused by the theory of modified descent, soon began to overthrow 

 the views of naturalists and to assign a new significance to mor- 



1 Wilhelm Ostwald, The Relation of Biology and the Neighboring Sciences (Uni- 

 versity of California Publications, Physiology, vol. 1, p. 15, Oct., 1903). 



