UTAH ACADEMY OF SCIENCES 69 
follow”. Little by little the belief in Darwinism grew; 
and when Darwin died in 1882, well could Huxley say of 
him: “He found a great truth trodden under foot. Reviled 
by bigots, and ridiculed by all the world, he lived long 
enough to see it, chiefly by his own efforts, irrefragably 
established in science, inseparably incorporated with the 
common thoughts of men, and only hated and feared by 
those who would revile, but dare not’. And so, in the 
language of a current writer, “organic evolution became the 
most stupendous scientific structure of the nineteenth cen- 
tury”, profoundly influencing the thoughts and the methods 
of all the sciences. But its greatest gift to the sciences is 
the fact that through it the shackles of ecclesiastical bond- 
age were stricken from scientific investigation; and thus 
freed, so wonderful an impetus was given to research along 
all lines of science that the nineteenth century has been 
aptly nicknamed ‘The Century of Science’. 
So much for the general debt owed by all sciences to 
the results from biological investigation. In tracing the 
history of medicine, chemistry, geology, agriculture, we 
find all of them have been influenced to a greater or less 
extent by results obtained in biological research. 
Let us take the case of medicine. Previous to the 
last quarter of the nineteenth century, we find that nearly 
every botanist was also a physician. The main reason for 
this was that one could hardly expect to earn a living as a 
botanist. Positions in colleges were extremely few, and 
there was not the opportunity offered in government work 
that exists to-day. And so it is not surprising to find the 
vast influence of botany upon medical science. Many of the 
drugs used came from plants, and the botanist-physician did 
much toward making the plants of the world known to 
science, and in founding a materia medica. But in other 
important ways did the biologist aid in influencing medical 
science. In outlining this influence, let us begin with the 
year 1668, and with the work of Francesco Redi—poet, 
physician, scholar, naturalist. Redi lived at a time when 
the teachings of Aristotle were still believed in—that liv- 
ing things were created from non-living matter. As Lucre- 
