JANUARY 18, 1884.] 
the sort of machine through which the vital force 
worked, — just as some people find it amusing to 
visit the former abode of a great author, and see his 
library and writing-table and inkstand; and there 
might be discussions as to the locality of the body 
in which this vital force resided; to carry out our 
simile, as to what was its favorite armchair. Various 
guessers placed it in the heart, the lungs, the blood, 
the brain, and so forth. Paracelsus, with more show 
of reason, located it in close connection with the 
stomach, on the top of which he supposed there 
was seated a chief vital spirit, Archaeus, who super- 
intended digestion. Itis mainly to Descartes,! who 
lived in the earlier half of the seventeenth century, 
that physiology owes the impulse which set it free 
from such will-o’-the-wisps. Putting aside all con- 
sciousness as the function of the soul, he main- 
tained that all other vital phenomena were due to 
properties of the material of which the body is com- 
posed; and that death was not due to any defect of 
the soul, but to some important alteration or degen- 
eration in some part or parts of the body. 
The influence of Descartes, and in the same half- 
century the demonstration of the circulation of the 
blood.by Harvey, gave a great impulse to experimen- 
tal physiology. Both Harvey and Descartes, how- 
ever, still believed in a special locally placed vital 
spirit or vital force, which animated the whole bod- 
ily frame as the engine in a great factory moves 
all the machinery in it. What a muscle did, or a 
gland did, depended on the structure and properties 
of the muscle or gland; but the work-power was 
derived from a force outside those organs, —on vital 
spirits supplied from the brain along the nerves, or 
carried to every part in the blood. As the pattern of 
a carpet will depend on the structure and arrange- 
ment of the loom,— which loom, however, is worked 
by a distant steam-engine, — so the results of muscular 
or glandular activity were believed to be determined 
by the structure of muscle and gland; but the mov- 
ing-force came from some other part of the body. 
The next essential advance was made by Haller, 
about the middle of the eighteenth century. He 
demonstrated that the contracting-power of a muscle 
did not depend on vital spirits carried to it in nerve 
or blood, but on properties of the muscle itself. 
Others had guessed, Haller proved, that the body of 
one of the higher animals is not a collection of ma- 
chines worked by a central motor, but a collection of 
machines each of which in itself is both steam-engine 
and loom; leaving aside, of course, certain of the 
purely mechanical supporting and protecting appara- 
tuses of the skeleton. This was the death-blow of 
the ‘vital force’ doctrine. Extensions of Haller’s 
method showed that it was possible to destroy the 
brain and spinal cord of an animal, and separate its 
muscles, its heart, its nerves, its glands, and yet keep 
all these isolated organs working as in life for many 
hours. The life of an animal could be no longer re- 
garded as an entity residing in one region of the body, 
from which it animated the rest; and the word gradu- 
1 See Huxley: The connection of the biological sciences with 
medicine (The lancet, Aug. 13, 1881). 
SCIENCE. 
75 
ally became simply a convenient phrase for expressing 
the totality or resultant of the lives of the individ- 
ual organs. Physiologists began to see that they had 
nothing to do with seeking a vital force, or with 
essences or absolutes; that their business was to 
study the phenomena exhibited by living things, and 
leave the noumena, if there were such, to amuse meta- 
physicians. Physiology thenceforth became more 
and more a study of the mechanics, physics, and 
chemistry of living organisms and parts of organisms. 
Progress at first was necessarily very slow; physics 
and chemistry, as we now know them, did not exist; 
galvanism was not discovered; osmosis was unknown; 
the conservation of energy was undreamed of; while 
modern chemistry did not take its rise until the dis- 
covery of oxygen by Priestly, and the extension and 
application of that discovery by Lavoisier towards the 
close of the last century. Physiology had to wait 
then, as now, for its advance upon the development 
of the sciences, dealing with simpler forms of matter 
than those found in living things. But little by little, 
step after step, so many once mysterious vital pro- 
cesses have been explained as merely special illustra- 
tions of general, physical, and chemical laws, that 
now the physiologist scans each advance in these sci- 
ences in full confidence that it will enable him to add 
another to the phenomena of living bodies, which are 
in ultimate analysis not peculiar or ‘ vital,’ but simply 
physico-chemical. Apart from the phenomena of 
mind, whose mysterious connection with forms of 
matter he can never hope to explain, if a modern 
physiologist were asked what is the object of his sci- 
ence, he would answer, ‘‘ not the discovery or the 
localization of a vital force, but the study of the 
quantity of oxidizable food taken into the stomach, 
and the quantity of oxygen absorbed in the lungs; 
the calculation of the energy or force liberated by 
the combination of the food and oxygen; and obser- 
vation of the way in which that force has been ex- 
pended, and the means by which its distribution may 
be influenced.’’ 
Once it was recognized that at least the great 
majority of physiological problems were problems ad- 
mitting of experimental investigation, the necessity 
for special collections of apparatus suitable for experi- 
ment on living plants and animals, and for affording 
students an opportunity to study the play of forces in 
living organisms, had not long to wait for recognition. 
Physiological laboratories were organized at first in 
such rooms as could be spared in buildings constructed 
for other purposes; later, in structures built for this 
special end. The first laboratory specially erected for 
physiological work was built for Vierordt, in Tibin- 
gen, less than twenty years ago. So far as I know, 
our own is the first such building in the United 
States. 
There is still another reason which has combined 
with the recognition of the independence of physiol- 
ogy as a science to make the modern laboratory, open 
to all properly prepared students, a possibility; and 
physiology owes it to this country. I do not forget 
how Brown-Sequard in Philadelphia clinched and 
completed Bernard’s great discovery of the vaso-motor 
