pathologique éloigne du vitalisme, beaucoup d’anatomie pathologique y ramène.” It is impossible to make much of this position. It leaves the theory with one of the opposing parties, the practice with the other, and the problem just where it was before. Preyer’s Position. Along with Virchow, we must name another of the older generation, the physiologist William Preyer, who combated “vitalism,” “dualism,” and “mechanism” with equal vehemence, and issued a manifesto, already somewhat solemn and official, against “vital force.” And yet he must undoubtedly be regarded as a vitalist by mechanists and vitalists alike.(79) He is more definite than Virchow, for he does not content himself with general statements as to the “origin” of vital force, and of the “swinging over” of the merely mechanical energies into the domain of the vital, but holds decidedly to the proposition _omne vivum e vivo_. He therefore maintains that life has always existed in the cosmos, and entirely rejects spontaneous generation. The fallacy, he says, of the mechanistic claims was due to the increasing number of physical explanations of isolated vital phenomena, and of imitations of the chemical products of organic metabolism. A wrong conclusion was drawn from these. “Any one who hopes to deduce from the chemical and physical properties of the fertilised egg the necessity that an animal, tormented by hunger and love must, after a certain time, arise therefrom, has a pathetic resemblance to the miserable manufacturers of homunculi.” Life is one of the underivable and inexplicable fundamental functions of universal being. From all eternity life has only been produced from life. As Preyer accepts the Kant-Laplace theory of the origin of our earth from the sun, he reaches ideas which have points of contact with the “cosmo-organic” ideas of Fechner. Life was present even when the earth was a fiery fluid sphere, and was possibly more general and more abundant then than it is now. And life as we know it may only be a smaller and isolated expression of that more general life.(80)