organism in the general forms of disease. Thus, I meant to build up a theory of the essentiality of disease. Specific causes were mentioned only as examples—for instance, intoxication; and, though but briefly alluded to, parasites have not been entirely overlooked."
His attitude toward Darwinism has been likewise misapprehended. Far from being an opponent of Darwinism, he should be regarded as one of its forerunners, for, as early as 1849, in his "Movement in Favor of Unity in Scientific Medicine," he spoke of the origin of life as a mechanical necessity; and in 1858, a year before the publication of Darwin's "Origin of Species," he pointed, in an oration which was afterward printed in 1862, with three other orations on "Life" and "Disease," to the changeability and transmutability of species as a necessary basis for the mechanical theory of life. But, when Haeckel insisted upon the inclusion of the theories of natural selection among the subjects to be taught in the public elementary schools, Virchow objected that only established facts and results, not theories, should be taught in the public schools.
To Haeckel's contradictions of religious faith Virchow is able to return a tacit answer, by adhering to what he wrote more than thirty years ago, that "faith does not admit of a scientific discussion, for science and faith exclude each other. Not to such an extent, however, that one of them renders the other an impossibility, but in such a way that, within the range of science, there is no place for faith; and the latter can commence only where the former ends. It need not be denied that, if this boundary-line be respected, faith may have actual objects. It is not, therefore, the domain of science to attack faith or its objects; but its duty is to mark and consolidate the present termination of knowledge."
Among the earlier papers written by Virchow and published in his first collections were some on different features and diseases of the skull and brain. These were followed by other cranial studies, and thus the physician was led to the study of anthropology, archæology, and paleontology. He was one of the founders of the German Archæological Society, which was organized at the meeting of the German naturalists at Innsprück in 1869, and he became the president of the society in 1870. He has also been the leader of the Berlin Anthropological Society since 1869, and has himself undertaken extensive and important researches. Having become engaged in a controversy with Quatrefages respecting the origin of the Prussian race (Quatrefages maintaining that it was of Finnic descent), he instituted those investigations, among the school-children of Germany, into the relative prevalence of blondes and brunettes, which have proved very interesting in their progress and results, and which have been taken up in other states. As a member of the Academy of Sciences, to which he was elected in 1873, he read important anthropological papers in 1875 and 1876; and in the latter year delivered an address at the meeting
