United States or Georgia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
On a warm evening after a serene summer day the constable from the nearest city hall and the chairman of the parish council plodded along together toward the cottage of the Widow Driesch. Katherine Driesch was cooking her evening porridge. Her William had just driven in the herd; the last blast of his trumpet still reverberated in the air and every cow was rushing, tail up, into her stall.
The whole situation seems serious, but it is not so disastrous as it appears at first sight. It is not quite so certain that the problem of organic life can be settled in terms of chemical combinations and mechanism. Many scientists are agreed on this point, although they repudiate the claims of neo-vitalists such as Driesch and Reinke.
Among the vitalists of to-day, one of the most frequently cited, perhaps, except Driesch the most frequently cited, is G. Wolff, a Privatdozent, formerly at Würzburg, now at Basle. He has only published short lectures and essays, and these deal not so much with the mechanical theory as with Darwinism.
It came from a young zoologist at Vienna who had thoroughly mastered Wigand's great anti-Darwinian work, an intelligent investigator who had set to work in the spirit of Wigand. Another talented zoologist, Hans Driesch, dedicates to the memory of Wigand two books in rapid succession and reprehends the contemporaries of that master of science for ignoring him.
An outlook and interpretation which Driesch maintained for a while, but afterwards abandoned, has been developed in an original and peculiar fashion by Eugen Albrecht, Prosector and Pathologist in Munich. It is the theory of different ways of looking at things.
"We shall find out about that. If the fellow has not done it, they will send him back home again before very long!" Indeed they would! Of this she was quite certain. But William did not come as soon as Widow Driesch had expected.
Driesch changed by pressure the relative position of the cells of a very young embryo, so that those which in a normal embryo would have produced one organ were now compelled, if used at all, to form quite a different one. And yet these displaced cells formed the organ required of cells normally occupying this new position, not the one for which they were normally intended.
But the idea thus started was pressed into general service. New dominants are added, and the theory advances farther and farther from the “machine theory,” becomes ever more enigmatical, and more vitalistic. The Constructive Work of Driesch.
If we cannot construct a "tree" for fowls, how absurd to adventure into the deeper recesses of Phylogeny. If all that Professor Bateson says is true, is not Driesch right when he speaks of "the phantasy christened Phylogeny"?
Word Of The Day