756 The American Naturalist. [September, 
Laboratories are now so universally recognized as essential 
for the systematic study and advancement of all physical and 
natural sciences, that we can hardly realize that they are al- 
most wholly the creation of the last three-quarters of the pres- 
ent century. With the awakening of scientific thought in 
Western Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, nat- 
ural phenomena again began to be studied by those methods 
of exact observation and experiment which had received their 
last fruitful application centuries before in the hands of the 
natural philosophers and physicians of Greece and Alexandria. 
For the purposes of such study, learned academies and socie- 
ties were founded, botanical gardens were planted, explora- 
tions and collections of natural curiosities were made, appara- 
tus was devised and individual investigators had their scientific 
workships. All of these material circumstances greatly pro- 
moted scientific inquiry and discovery, but with one exception 
they did not lead to the formation of laboratories freely open 
to students and investigators. The exception was the estab- 
lishment of laboratories for the study of human anatomy. 
It is of no little interest, both for the history of biology and 
for that of science in general, that the first laboratory for the 
training of students was the anatomical laboratory. For over 
six hundred years there has been at least some practical in- 
struction in anatomy, and for over three hundred years there 
have existed anatomical laboratories for students and investi- 
gators. Until the end of the first quarter of the present cen- 
tury there was no branch of physical or natural science, with 
the exception of anatomy, which students could study in the 
laboratory. Only in this subject could they come into direct 
personal contact with the object of study, work with their own 
hands, investigate what lay below the surface, and acquire 
that living knowledge which alone is of real value in the 
study of natural science. 
The era of modern teaching and investigating laboratories 
was ushered in by the foundation of one devoted to another of 
the biological sciences. In 1824 Purkinje established a phy- 
siological laboratory in Breslau which antedated by one yeat 
Liebig’s more famous chemical laboratory in Giessen. This 
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