BIOLOGY AND CHEMISTRY 



usually done. The very experiment is what is 

 characteristic of the physiologist's method, in the 

 same way as comparison is the chief characteristic 

 of Morphology or Comparative Biology. 



We shall not be surprised to first find physical 

 methods in predominance upon the field of Ex- 

 perimental Biology. This was in the age of Newton. 

 Some decades later the work of Lavoisier in France, 

 of Cavendish, Priestley, and Ingenhousz in England, 

 and of Scheele in Sweden brought the dawn of 

 scientific Chemistry. It was not a mere chance 

 that the discovery of oxygen was closely connected 

 with the important discovery of the fact that 

 living green plants produce in bright sunlight a 

 considerable amount of the newly discovered 

 gaseous element. We henceforth see Chemistry 

 and Physiology growing as sister- sciences, and no 

 era of Plant-Physiology was richer in important 

 discoveries than that of the foundation of modern 

 chemistry inaugurated by the great Lavoisier. 

 At the same time that Chemistry was born, 

 Biochemistry, or the knowledge of Chemical Phe- 

 nomena in Life, came into being. 



Every extraordinary advance in Science was 

 accompanied by a revival of materialistic philo- 

 sophy. The age of Newton, Lavoisier, D'Alembert, 

 and Maupertuis was the mother of La Mettrie's 

 work L'Homme Machine. A century and a half 

 before our days imaginative minds even thought 

 of a chemical synthesis of living cells. When 



