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XVII.—Observations on the Principle of Vital Affinity, as illustrated by recent discoveries in Organic Chemistry
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 January 2013
Extract
The most important steps in a science are those which lead most directly to the establishment of principles or laws peculiar to that science itself, and which constitute its claim to be regarded as a distinct branch of human knowledge. It has been long acknowledged that such is the character of many of those phenomena of living bodies which depend on mechanical movements, or changes of position in their particles, and therefore that the laws of vital contractions are to be regarded as equally elementary and distinctive principles in physiology, as the laws of motion or of gravitation in natural philosophy. But a diificulty has been long felt, as to whether a similar claim to peculiarity of the principle on which they depend, can be urged for the chemical phenomena of living bodies.
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- Research Article
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- Earth and Environmental Science Transactions of The Royal Society of Edinburgh , Volume 16 , Issue 2 , 1846 , pp. 165 - 188
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- Copyright © Royal Society of Edinburgh 1846
References
page 166 note * Hist, des Sciences Naturelles depuis 1789, p. 218.Google Scholar
page 166 note † Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, vol. ii., pp. 39 and 47.Google Scholar
page 167 note * Professor Whewell, in his instructive abstract of the general principles ascertained in Physiology, regards it as established, chiefly on the authority of Müller, in regard to the vital force concerned in assimilation and secretion, that “it has mechanical efficacy, producing motions, &c. But it exerts at the same point both an attraction and a repulsion, attracting matter on one side and repelling it on the other; and in this it differs entirely from mechanical forces.”—Philosophy of Inductive Sciences, vol. ii., p. 51. See also Carpenter's, Manual of Physiology, § 597, et seq.Google Scholar
page 169 note * In the foregoing and other translations from recent German writers, the word force is used in a sense which I think would be much better expressed by the term power or property, merely on this account, that the English word force, in physical discussions, has usually a precise and limited meaning assigned to it, as a cause capable of producing visible motion, and of which we have a measure, either in the velocity or in the quantity of motion which it can excite; whereas the term power or property, applied to any material substance, has a more general meaning, as simply the cause of change of any kind, and is therefore applicable where the result of the property ascribed to any substance may be very different from visible motion.
page 170 note * See Macaire's, Memoir of Theodore de Saussure, in Edinburgh Philosophical Journal, vol. xl. p. 31. (Jan. 1846.)Google Scholar
page 170 note † de Saussure, Theodore, in Edinburgh Philosophical Journal, vol. xl. pp. 22, 23.Google Scholar
page 176 note * Report in Forbes's Medical Review, July 1843.
page 182 note * See Carpenter's Manual of Physiology, § 493.