with the celebration. Hyrtl took up the office of Rector on October 1st 1864 and chose for the subject of his Inaugural Address: "The Materialistic Theories of our Day" 1.

It was certainly not the first pronouncement made by men of science against materialism. But the condemnation by a man of Hyrtl's reputation of this favourite child of the modern mind, delivered amid all the pomp and solemnity of the public fête, attracted unusual attention, and aroused a storm of controversy in the Liberal Press of Vienna. We can understand the violent and angry abuse heaped on Hyrtl by his critics if we read his speech. He thrust materialism bodily aside as unscientific, and protested against the procedure of those who sought to make science responsible for this "extravagant expression of a system of thought that has allowed itself to be betrayed and benighted on a bye-way".

"To sum up.. said Hyrtl2, "I cannot understand what scientific grounds have justified the resurrection of the old materialistic theories of Epicurus and Lucretius, or have assured to them a universal and permanent empire over the human mind. Observation and experience speak no more in their favour to-day than they ever did; the exact methods of modern science, so properly eulogised, have not led to any discovery that makes materialism easier of acceptance. is now what it was then, a speculative hypothesis and no "cognitio certa ex principiis certis", to use the Roman orator's

It

1 Reprinted in Allgemeine Bücherei, herausgeg. von der österreichischen Leo - Gesellschaft Nr. 4, Wien und Leipzig. Cf. Der Katholik XLV, Mainz 1865, 2, 641-651. Natur und Offenbarung X, Münster 1864, 569 f. For Hyrtl as scientist cf. Leopoldina XXXI, Halle 1895, 190 f 211 f.

2 Allgemeine Bücherei Nr. 4, p. 36-37.

definition of science. It is an inference, resting, not on clear and irrefutable argument, but on boldness of assumption and assertion, and on the dominant temper of the day which finds such theories the more congenial, the more menacing they are to the established order of things. The earth-born Titan of materialism has not achieved a lasting victory over the kingdom of science. No such victory will ever be achieved so long as serious science refuses to abandon the fight, so long as science draws its strength and inspiration from the stable ground of fact, so long as it refuses to count its own cause as lost, or to sacrifice to false gods.

"But if science is able, as it is able, to shake itself clear of this proud rival, so many times defeated yet never slain, then do not avert your eyes from the work of the true and earnest investigator. He too is a priest of knowledge; for, to adopt the words of the poet prince:

Willst du zuletzt zum Unendlichen schreiten,

Dann geh vorerst im Endlichen nach allen Seiten."

X. ZOOLOGY AND BOTANY.

Like Pasteur, but in a very different direction, the German scientist Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg († 1876), won his reputation in the sphere of the infinitely little1. Having published many papers of original research, he undertook in the years 1820 to 1825 a scientific expedition to the Nile Valley. He was accompanied by Hemprich, and the two colleagues brought back with them to Berlin a large selection of Natural history specimens. In 1829 Ehrenberg made a second journey with A. Von Humboldt and G. Rose to the Ural and Altai region. But his most important work was his

1 Max Laue, Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg. Ein Vertreter deutscher Naturforschung im 19. Jahrhundert, Berlin 1895. Joh. Hanstein in Allgemeine deutsche Biographie V 701-711.

determination of the properties of the infusoria. These had been brought within the range of science by the invention of the microscope, but before Ehrenberg's researches very little was known about them, and that little was interwoven with fables and delusions. It was still believed that they were spontaneously generated by decaying matter, and that the forms which they assumed were due to mere chance and passed easily into others. Ehrenberg put a very different complexion on the matter 1.

It was his discovery in the waters of one of Berlin's supply-stations of a swarming population of these minute organisms that first made Ehrenberg's name famous and familiar. Kings and princes summoned him and his microscope to their presence, and he was received with honour in Paris and England. His reputation was further increased by his demonstration of the important part played in nature by the most minute forms of life. To this section of his work belong his studies on marine phosphorescence, on the blood-like blotches to be observed on bread and other foods, on edible earths, on blood-rain and dust-rain. Still more important was his discovery that certain widely-diffused kinds of stone and earth are composed of lime and pebbles formed from the casings of primitive animals. "But Ehrenberg reached the height of his reputation among his fellow-citizens of Berlin when in 1841 he showed that the earth, on which their city stood, was made up, to the extent of one half or even two-thirds, of hard-shelled living animalcules, busily swarming hither and thither, and

1 For further details v. R. Hertwig, Lehrbuch der Zoologie 5, Jena 1900, 157.

constantly bringing forth new broods out of their tiny green eggs.'' 1

Many of Ehrenberg's contentions are, it is true, no longer admitted. Subsequent research has shown that he was wrong in ascribing to the infusoria an organism identical with that of the higher animals, in spite of its microscopical dimensions. Many organisms too, which he classified as infusoria have been removed from that class and transferred to Botany, and others are now ranked among various branches of the protozoa. none the less he stands as the pioneer of the modern science of the protozoa, the first to fix the attention of science on the "infinitely little", and to show the relations of this latter to the "infinitely great".

But

Ehrenberg was a resolute opponent of materialism.

"From his youth", says Hanstein 2, "he held firmly to the idealistic interpretation of nature and conceived it as ordered by the reasonable, purposive laws of a conscious Creator. But as a scientist he was the purest and most dispassionate empiricist."

When "German science turned away from the sure method of unprejudiced empirical study, to which Ehrenberg was ever loyal, and gave itself up to airy and fantastic hypotheses, he resolutely opposed the new tendency. He was in no way hostile to sober consideration of the theory of descent as guided by intelligible laws, although for his own part he was content to put it aside for the time as an hypothesis incapable of demonstration. But the speculative extravagances which under the name of 'natural selection' were at that time setting all heads in a whirl, the wild imagining of transition-forms between plants and animals, the 'protistkingdom' as they were called, these and the like airy spe

1 Laue ante 194.

2 Allgemeine deutsche Biographie V 705.

Kneller, Christianity.

22

culations he banished with just contempt from the region of inductive science to that of poetic fancy" 1.

Ehrenberg spoke frequently and forcibly in criticism of the materialism dominant in his day. Thus in a speech in the Berlin Academy on October 17th 1850.

"It is not out of place", he said, "to touch, though but superficially, on certain hypotheses, which, after the morbid manner of the day, have been widely represented as results of scientific research, and which have made a deep impression alike on learned societies and on the popular mind."

"Men of great name and authority have, speaking as scientists, put science in an attitude of hostility to religion — not merely to the dominant, but to every form of religion, and maintained, that our conceptions of the present and the future of man must be based on the conclusions of a science which is supposed to lead inevitably to materialism and Epicureanism."

Ehrenberg then goes on to deal in particular with two "conclusions" of science (1) “that religion, in the only sense and significance which scientific research can allow it consists, solely of a feeling of dependence in relation to nature" and (2) that all vital processes are in essence nothing more than electricity.

With regard to the first of these "conclusions" he remarks among other things: "It is quite true that the scientist realises more keenly than anyone else the dependence, the paltriness of man, whose weakness it is to be too puny for the infinity of space and too gross for the imperceptibly small, which yet governs and moulds his life. But besides this 'dependence' he feels the sublime and beneficent order of the universe and bows, in humility, admiration, and hope, before it, and before its Creator. He feels himself in sympathetic relation with the Maker and Orderer of all. It is senseless to rail at the order of the world." 2

1 Allgemeine deutsche Biographie V 710.

2 Monatsberichte der Berliner Akademie 1850, 397-398.