AUTHOR'S PREFACE. 



. THE lectures which I herewith lay before the medical public at 

 large were delivered in the early part of this year, in the new Pa- 

 thological Institute of the University of Berlin, in the presence of 

 a somewhat numerous assembly of medical men, for the most part 

 physicians practising in the town. The object chiefly aimed at in 

 them, illustrated as they were by as extensive a series of microscop- 

 ical preparations as it was in my power to supply, was to furnish a 

 clear and connected explanation of those facts upon which, accord- 

 ing to my ideas, the theory of life must now be based, and out of 

 Avhich also the science of pathology has now to be constructed. 

 They were more particularly intended as an attempt to offer in a 

 better arranged form than had hitherto been done, a view of the 

 cellular nature of all vital processes, both physiological and patho- 

 logical, animal and vegetable, so as distinctly to set forth what even 

 the people have long been dimly conscious of, namely, the unity of 

 life* in all organized beings, in opposition to the one-sided humoral 

 and neuristical (solidistic) tendencies which have been transmitted 

 from the mythical days of antiquity to our own times, and at the 

 same time to contrast with the equally one-sided interpretations of a 

 grossly mechanical and chemical bias the more delicate mechanism 

 and chemistry of the cell. 



In consequence of the great advances that have been made in the 

 details of science, it has been becoming continually more and more 



* See Lect. I, p. 40 and Lect. XIV., pp. 322-324. TBANS. 



