96 THE HISTORY OF CREATION. 
entertain a very kindly feeling towards him. Although they 
lived for some time in the same neighbourhood, yet the 
natures of these two men were so very different, that they 
could not well be drawn towards each other. Oken’s “ Manual 
of the Philosophy of Nature,” which may be desivnated as the 
most important production of the nature-philosophy school 
then existing in Germany, appeared in 1809, the same year 
in which Lamarck’s fundamental work, the “ Philosophie 
Zoologique,’ was published. As early as 1802, Oken had 
published an “ Outline of the Philosophy of Nature.” As we 
have already intimated, in Oken’s as in Goethe’s works, a 
number of valuable and profound thoughts are hidden 
among a mass of erroneous, very eccentric, and fantastic con- 
ceptions. Some of these ideas have only quite recently and 
gradually become recognized in science, many years after 
they were first expressed. I shall here quote only two 
thoughts, which are almost prophetic, and which at the 
same time stand in the closest relation to the theory of. 
development. 
One of the most important of Oken’s theories, which was 
formerly very much decried, and was most strongly com- 
batted, especially by the so-called “exact experimentalists,” 
is the idea that the phenomena of life in all organisms pro- 
ceed from a common chemical substance, so to say, from a 
general simple vital-substance, which he designated by the 
name Urschleim, or original slime. By it he meant, as the 
name indicates, a mucilaginous substance, an albuminous 
combination, which exists in a semi-fluid condition of aggre- 
gation, and possesses the power, by adaptation to different 
conditions of existence in the outer world and by inter- 
action with its material, of producing the most various forms. 
