PHYSICS AND BIOLOGY. Paul 
mechanical view of nature has for many years been so 
firmly established in certain domains of natural science, that 
it is here unnecessary to say much about it. It no longer 
occurs to physicists, chemists, mineralogists, or astronomers, 
to seek to find in the phenomena which continually appear 
before them in their scientific domain the action of a Creator 
acting for a definite purpose. They universally, and with- 
out hesitation, look upon the phenomena which appear in 
their different departments of study as the necessary and 
invariable effects of physical and chemical forces which are 
inherent in matter. Thus far their view is purely material- 
istic, in a certain sense of that “ word of many meanings.” 
When a physicist traces the phenomena of motion in elec- 
tricity or magnetism, the fall of a heavy body, or the 
undulations in the waves of light, he never, in the whole 
course of -his research, thinks of looking for the interference 
of a supernatural power. In this respect, Biology, as the 
science of so-called “ animated” natural bodies, was formerly 
placed in sharp opposition to the above-mentioned inorganic 
natural sciences (Anorganology). It is true modern Physi- 
ology, the science of the phenomena of motion in animals 
and plants, has completely adopted the mechanical view ; but 
Morphology, the science of the forms of animals and plants, 
has not been affected at all by it. Morphologists, in spite of 
the position of physiology, have continued, as before, in oppo- 
sition to the mechanical view of functions, to look upon the 
forms of animals and plants as something which cannot be 
at all explained mechanically, but which must owe its origin 
necessarily to a higher, supernatural creative power, acting 
for a definite purpose. 
In this general view it is quite indifferent whether the 
