ON THi: MoltPHOLOGICAL VIEW OF NATLKK. 209 



organism as a pure machine lay an answer to the great 

 problems of life and consciousness, Tlieodor Schwann 9 



Schwanu. 



proclaimed about 1840, on the basis of minute micro- 

 scopic observation, the essential identity of animal 

 and vegetable — i.e., of all living — structure, thus taking 

 probably the greatest ste]) in uniting researches which 

 had so far been carried uu in a tUsconnected fashi(jn. 

 Here is the beginning of the modern theory oi the 

 organic cell — of cellular pathology, antl the actual in- 

 auguration of modern biology. Twenty years later, the 

 appearance of Darwin's ' Origin of Species ' urged still 10 

 further the study of the whole of organic life from a 

 comprehensive point of view. In addition it led to a 

 closer union with the sciences of inorganic nature, an 

 appeal being now made to palteontological and geological 

 records in proof of the gradual development of all forms 

 of living as well as of inanimate reality. The studies 

 of the geologist, which up to then had l)een prosecuted 

 on independent lines, joined hands not only with those 

 of the zoologist and botanist, but likewise with the 

 theory of cosmological genesis of the planetary system, 

 as proclaimed at the end of the former century by 

 Laplace in his ' Exposition du Systeme du Monde,' and 

 fifty years earlier by Kant in his 'Natural History 

 of the Heavens.' If in the course of our century, 

 through the combined influence of travel on the one side 

 and medicine on the other, the history of natural objects 

 has been united in the larger conception of bicjlogy, this 

 itself at the close of the century promises to be united 

 with geology and astro-physics (a science almost entirely 

 founded on the invention and on the nidations of the 



VOL. II. " 



