1296 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters. 
having been shown to be unfounded, are not calculated to en- 
courage further efforts in this line. The notion that living 
beings always spring from living beings and not from inani¬ 
mate matter is so deeply rooted that probably no biologist is 
attempting to synthesize any living forms, however simple. 
May we hope that out of the intensive work of Otto Lehman, 
the great molecular physicist, this seeming impossibility may 
yet be accomplished? Up to 1828 it was thought that the 
•chemical products of plant and animal metabolism could only 
be produced by the life process; and yet when Woehler syn¬ 
thesized urea the spell was broken, and soon many other or¬ 
ganic compounds were synthetically prepared, whose artificial 
synthesis was thought to be quite impossible. 
In biological lines, the great- advances in modern' surgery 
stand out preeminently. These were made possible by the de¬ 
velopment of bacteriology, which pointed out the way to se¬ 
cure aseptic conditions under which alone major surgical opera¬ 
tions have any chance for success. Tor many years biologists 
Lave engaged in studying the anatomy of living forms and 
•classifying them. This work has given the biological sciences 
the name descriptive sciences. While this study of form is 
of great importance, and while it has always been closely asso¬ 
ciated with the study and description of functions, that is with 
physiology, the latter has of recent years come into the fore¬ 
ground more and more. It is recognized that the great prob¬ 
lem in botany is not so much to describe new forms of plant 
life as to discover what goes on within a plant, even the com¬ 
monest weed by the wayside, as it lives. Experimental physi- 
ology, the crowning glory of biological studies, is slowly but 
surely coming into prominence, and great things are to be ex¬ 
pected of it, though its path of progress is a difficult one. 
Think of the foundation in chemical, physical, physico-chemical 
and biological studies that its successful pursuit presupposes. 
We ask how nourishment passes from the alimentary tract into 
the blood, and how the various glands of the body manufac¬ 
ture the various secretions in each individual case from one and 
the same fluid, the blood; and meanwhile chemists and phy- 
