372 LUDWIG AND MODERN PHYSIOLOGY. 



tute to divide it into three parts, experimental (in the more restricted 

 sense), chemical, and histological. Well aware that it was impossible 

 for a man who is otherwise occupied to maintain his familiarity with the 

 technical details of histology and physiological chemistry, he placed 

 these departments under the charge of younger men capable of keep- 

 ing them up to the rapidly advancing standard of the time, his rela- 

 tions with his coadjutors being such that he had no difficulty in retaining 

 his hold of the threads of the investigation to which these special lines 

 of inquiry were contributory. 



It is scarcely necessary to say that as an experimenter Ludwig was 

 unapproachable. The skill with which he carried out difficult and 

 complicated operations, the care with which he worked, his quickness 

 of eye and certainty of hand were qualities which he had in common 

 with great surgeons. In employing animals for experiment he strongly 

 objected to rough and ready methods, comparing them to "firing a 

 pistol into a clock to see how it works." Every experiment ought, he 

 said, to be carefully planned and meditated on beforehand, so as to 

 accomplish its scientific purpose and avoid the infliction of pain. To 

 insure this he performed all operations himself, only rarely committing 

 the work to, a skilled coadjutor. 



His skill in anatomical work was equally remarkable. It had been 

 acquired in early days, and appeared throughout his life to have given 

 him very great pleasure, for Mosso tells how, when occupying the room 

 adjoining that in which Ludwig was working, as he usually did, by him- 

 self, he heard the outbursts of glee which accompanied each successful 

 step in some difficult anatomical investigation. 



Let us now examine more fully the part which Ludwig played in the 

 revolution of ideas as to the nature of vital processes which, as we have 

 seen, took place in the middle of the x>resent century. 



Although, as we shall see afterwards, there were many men who 

 before Lud wig's time investigated the phenomena of life from the physi- 

 cal side, it was he and the contemporaries who were associated with 

 him who first clearly recognized the importance of the principle that 

 vital phenomena can only be understood by comparison with their 

 physical counterparts, and foresaw that in this principle the future of 

 physiology was contained as in a nutshell. Feeling strongly the fruit- 

 lessness and unscientiiic character of the doctrines which were then 

 current, they were eager to discover chemical and physical relations in 

 the processes of life. In Ludwig's intellectual character this eagerness 

 expressed his dominant motive. Notwithstanding that his own re- 

 searches had in many instances proved that there are important func- 

 tions and processes in the animal Organism which have no physical or 

 chemical analogues, he never swerved either from the principle or from 

 the method founded upon it. 



Although Ludwig was strongly influenced by the rapid progress 

 which was being made in scientific discovery at the time that he 



