83 “Allgemeine Biologie” (2 vols.), Vienna, 1899.
_ 85 Cf._ especially Verworn’s example of the manufacture of sulphuric acid. See what we have previously said on the “second line” of mechanistic theory, along which Neumeister’s thought mainly moves. See especially p. 198. As regards the “fifth line,” the problem of the development of form in its present phase, there is an instructive short essay by Fr. Merkel (Nachrichten der K. Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften Göttingen. Geschäftl. Mitt. 1897, Heft 2)—“Welche Kräfte wirken gestaltend auf den Körper der Menschen und Tiere?” This essay avoids, obviously intentionally, the shibboleths of controversy. The mechanical point of view and the play with mechanical analogies and models are abruptly dismissed. “If things, which were in themselves susceptible of mechanical explanations, occur in the absence of the mechanical antecedent conditions, then we must seek for other forces to enable us to understand them.” And quite calmly a return is made to the old, simple conception of a “regulative” and a “formative force,” inherent as a capacity _sui generis_ within the “energids,” the really living parts of the cell. The cell-energid carries within it the “pattern” of the organisation, and the partial or perfect “capacity” (“Fertigkeit”) for producing and reproducing the whole organism. But these two forces “make use of” the physico-chemical forces as tools to work out details. So to describe the state of the case is not of course a solution of the problem; it is only a figurative formulation of it. But that, at the present day, we can and must return to doing this if we are to describe things simply and as they actually occur, is precisely what is most instructive in the matter.
86 “Beiträge zur Kritik der Darwinschen Lehre,” which was first published in the “Biologisches Zentralblatt,” 1898.
88 Before Wigand’s larger works there had appeared F. Delpino: “Applicazione della Teoria Darwinia ai Fiori ed agli Insetti Visitatori dei Fiori” (Bull. della Societa Entomologica Ital., Florence 1870). He says: “Un principio intrinsico, reagente, finchè dura la vita, contro le influenze estrinseche ossia contro gli agenti chimici e fisici.”