ponts_des_arts
How shall we depict phylogeny? Obviously, phylogeny unfolds historically as the sequence of ontogenies for all organisms making up a lineage.

Stephen Jay GOULD


Table of Contents

First steps of microbiology, evolution and neurobiology

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1875 Haeckel summarizes Fritz Müller's view on evolution by stating that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, an idea which is often used today despite much evidence to the contrary (at least in distant species), and despite clear manipulation of documents by Haeckel himself (a first case of scientific fraud...).

1875 Pierre-Joseph van Beneden (Mechlin 1809 - Louvain 1888) at the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium publishes a popular book: Les commensaux et les parasites dans le règne animal, which, translated into German and English later played an important role in demonstrating that the "lower animals" were not always parasites, but could be classified in terms of parasitisme, commensalisme and mutualisme. This work can be considered as the start point of the hypothesis of symbiosis.

1875 Richard Caton (Liverpool 1842 - 1926) records electrical activity from the brain, by directly probing animal brains.

1875 Using sea urchin as an experimental material, Wilhelm Oscar Hertwig (Friedberg 1849 - Berlin 1922) discovers the use of the sea urchin for fertilization studies and shows that the head of the spermatozoon becomes a pronucleus and combines with the female pronucleus as the zygote nucleus and establishes the concept that fertilization is the conjugation of two cells. He writes that Die Befruchtung beruht auf der Verrschmelzung von geschlectlich differenzierten Zellkernen indeed establishing the principles of fertilization, and further showing - against Haeckel - that there is no intermediary "monera" state in the process.

1875 Wilhelm Heinrich Erb (1840 - 1921) and Carl Friedrich Otto Westphal (1833 - 1889) independently describe the knee-jerk reflex.

1875-1880 Eduard Strasburger (Warszawa 1844 - Bonn 1912) accurately describes the processes of mitotic cell division (karyokinesis) in a series of experiments summarized in Zellbildung und Zellteilung.

1876 David Ferrier (1843 - 1928) in The Functions of the Brain describes different parts of monkey motor cortex.

1876 Hans Buchner (1850-1902) incorrectly reports the reversible transformation of the anthrax bacillus (Bacillus anthracis) into hay bacillus (Bacillus subtilis). It is not known whether he made an error in identification or simply used impure cultures. We observe the same thing today with commercial products sold as B. subtilis but which are actually Bacillus cereus, the parent species of B. anthracis.

1876 Otto Bütschli (1848-1920) publishes Studien über die Verjüngung in der Natur (Studies on rejuvenation in nature). He later proposes that the structure of protoplasm is alveolar or foam like.

1876 LeBel and Van't Hoff discover the key notion of asymmetric carbon, as the explanation for the optical activity of numerous molecules.

1876 Wilhelm Friedrich Kühne (1837-1900) finds a substance in pancreatic juice that degrades other biological substances (trypsin) (Über das Sekret des Pankreas). He subsequently proposes the term "Enzym" (meaning en zumh "in yeast") instead of "diastase" and distinguishes enzymes from the microorganisms that produce them.

1876 Ferdinand Cohn publie les Beiträge zur Biologie der Pflanzen where he studies many microbes and the formation of spores in Bacillus subtilis.

1876 Robert Koch (Clausthal 1843 - 1910) in his chapter Untersuchungen über Bacterien. V. Die Aetiologie der Milzbrand-Krankheit, begründet auf die Entwicklungageschichte des Bacillus Anthracis, published in the Beiträge zur Biologie der Pflanzen of Ferdinand Cohn shows that anthrax is caused by a specific organism. Koch's postulates for proving that a particular micro-organism is the cause of a particular disease greatly advance the Germ Theory of Disease. They are still used today in a slightly modified form proposed by Erwin Frink Smith (1854-1927) in 1905 to account for plant diseases:
1. The suspected causal organism must be constantly associated with the disease.
2. The suspected causal organism must be isolated from an infected host and grown in pure culture in a laboratory.
3. When a healthy susceptible host is inoculated with the pathogen from pure culture, symptoms of the original disease must develop.
4. The same pathogen as the original isolate must be re-isolated from hosts infected under experimental conditions.

1876 Cesare Lombroso (Verona, Italy, 1835 - 1909) when at the head of the psychiatric asylum at Pesaro publishes L'Uomo Criminale, later enlarged into a treaty, L'Uomo Delinquente in rapporto all'antropologia: alla giurisprudenza ed alle discipline (The Criminal Man). In this book he states that tendency to commit crimes is hereditary (some are born criminal) and he tries to describe objective signs of this particular behaviour. His approach is statistical (it was later expanded in the statistics of the school of eugenics during the XXth century) and aims at being based on scientific objectivity (Lombroso was an adept of phrenology, which pretended that the shape of the skull could tell much about behaviour). This work had enormous consequences in the future creation of scientific police as well as in helping to find strong arguments against capital punishment. However, Lombroso viewed this criminal tendency as a sign of degeneracy of Mankind and proposed many arguments in favour of eugenics, a trend that developed very much until it culminated with the advent of the Nazi dictature in Germany.

1876 Pasteur's Etudes sur la Bière: ses maladies, causes qui les provoquent, procédé pour la rendre inaltérable : avec une théorie nouvelle de la fermentation and correspondence with John Tyndall (Carlow 1820 - accidentally poisoned by his wife, 1893) on spontaneous generation. Tyndall (known for his work on colloids and to have given the explanation for the blue color of the sky) remarks the effect of a mold in slowing the growth of bacteria, more than 50 years before Alexander Fleming's chemical work on penicillin.

1876 Franz Christian Boll (1849-1879) reports to the Berlin Academy that visual purple is bleached by light.

1876 Francis Galton uses the expression "nature and nurture" to explain the respective roles of heredity and environment.

1877 Jean-Martin Charcot (Paris 1825 - near the lac des Settons 1893) publishes his famous Leçons sur les Maladies du Système Nerveux faites à la Salpêtrière so important for the birth of psychoanalysis.

1877 Gabriel Madeleine Camille Dareste (1822-1899), who had tried heat, cold and shaking on eggs since 1855, describes the successful production of developmental monstrosities in animals by experimental means, thus founding experimental teratology. For some, this work will reinforce their creed in the existence of the heredity of acquired characters.

1877 Albert Bernhard Frank (1839-1900) who was studying lichens, coins the word "Symbiotismus" to indicate the case when two species live on or in one another in a way which is not simply coexistence.

1877 Pasteur works on anthrax and septicemia and with his pupil Jules Joubert (1834-1910) discovers the etiological agent of gaseous gangrene (now Clostridium perfringens). Together they also discover antibiose i.e. the bacterial antagonism with the anthrax bacterium (bactéridie charbonneuse). Pasteur writes in a very explicit way: la vie empêche le vie and foreseeing antibiotherapy: tous ces faits autorisent peut-être les plus grandes espérances au point de vue thérapeutique.

1877 Karl Möbius (Eilenburg 1825 - Berlin 1908) publishes his concept of biocenose, to express the community of organisms associated within a particular environment. This concept has been used to identify the part of a genome that allows an organism to live in context, its cenome.

1878 Ernst Karl Abbe (Eisenach 1840 - Jena 1905) of the Carl Zeiss Optische Werke, improves apochromatic oil-immersion objective microscope lenses by using oils which match the refractive index of the lens and produces them.

1878 Just before his death, Claude Bernard describes the nerve/muscle blocking action of curare.

1878 Wilhelm Friedrich Kühne (1837 - 1900) editor of the European Journal Zeitschrift für Biologie isolates the visual pigment from retina (called rhodopsin).

1878 Jean-Henri Casimir Fabre (Saint -Léons 1823 - Sérignan-du-Comtat 1915) begins a long and famous series of Souvenirs Entomologiques. His work is translated in many languages, including Chinese.

1878 Paul Broca publishes his Anatomie comparée des circonvolutions cérébrales. Le grand lobe limbique et la scissure limbique dans le série des mammifères.

1878 Pasteur, Joubert and Charles Chamberland (Chilly-le-Vignoble 1851 - Paris 1908) publish La théorie des germes et ses applications à la médecine et à la chirurgie. This will be the start of modern sterilisation of fluids by filtration and heating.

1878 William Randolph Gowers (1845 - 1915) publishes Unilateral Gunshot Injury to the Spinal Cord describing a condition observed by Brown-Sequard (Brown-Sequard's syndrome after spinal cord injury).

1878 Anton de Bary (1831 - Strasbourg 1888), editor of the journal Botanische Zeitung, gives a conference at Cassel inspired by the ideas of Bernhardt Frank: Die Erscheinung der Symbiose, where he elaborates on the concept of symbiosis created by the latter.

1878-1879 Dastre publishes posthumously Claude Bernard's Leçons sur les Phénomènes de la vie communs aux animaux et aux végétaux.

1879 Haeckel in parallel with his systematic studies in Das System der Medusen, develops further his theory of Nature, according to which matter, form and energy combine thus leading to three scientific disciplines chemistry (Stofflehre), morphology and physics (Kraftslehre) forming natural sciences, with mineralogy, hydrology and meteorology making the science of inorganic matter and zoology, protistology and botany making life sciences. This culminates into a highly mechanical view of Nature, still much in use today.

1879 Camillo Golgi ( Corteno 1844 - Pavia 1926), professor in Pavia, describes the "musculo-tendineous organs" (later to be know as the Golgi tendon organs).

1879 Hermann Fol (1845-1892) observes directly the union of the gamete nuclei in syngamy in the sea urchin.

1879 William Crookes (London 1832 – London 1919) in his British Association Lecturedescribes his invention, the cathode ray tube and Radiant Matter.

1879 Albrecht Kossel (Rostock 1853 - Heidelberg 1927) isolates nucleoproteins from the heads of fish sperm cells.

1879 Pasteur in his Examen critique d'un écrit posthume de Claude Bernard sur la fermentation tries to refute (wrongly) the idea that fermentation can happen independently of life.

1879-1882 Walther Flemming (1843 - 1905), in his Zellsubstanz, Kern und Zellteilung published in Leipzig, describes and names "chromatin," "mitosis" and the "spireme". In this work he describes cell division in living and fixed cells of salamanders and counts the number of chromosomes and studies the longitudinal splitting of chromosomes during mitosis.

1879 Wilhelm Wundt (Nekarau 1832 - Leipzig 1920) sets up a laboratory devoted to the study of human behavior.

1880 Charles and his son Francis Darwin (1848 - 1925) show that a phototropic "influence" is transmitted from the tip of a unilaterally illuminated plant to the basal regions.

1880 Wallace publishes his reflexion on the development of life on islands in his book Island Life.

1880 Charles Louis Alphonse Laveran (1845-1922), while serving as a surgeon in Algeria, demonstrates that the causative agent of malaria is a protozoon and publishes his observations in a treaty the following year: Nature parasitaire des accidents de l'impaludisme : description d'un nouveau parasite trouvé dans le sang des malades atteints de fièvre palustre.

1880 Friedrich Siegmund Merkel (Nüremberg 1845 - Göttingen 1919) in Über die Endigungen der sensiblen Nerven in der Haut der Wirbelthiere describes free nerve endings later known as "Merkel's disks" and "Merkel's corpuscles" and responsible for touch and pain.

1880 Sydney Ringer (1835-1910) investigates the influence of inorganic ions on heart contraction, making possible an analysis of heart metabolism and the replacement of body fluids. He develops what is now known as Ringer's solutions for the perfusion of isolated tissues and studied the use of body temperature as a diagnostic indicator.

1880 Jean-Baptiste Edouard Gélineau (1859 - 1906) who had a patient who spontaneously came to sleep without reason, coins the word "narcolepsie" (Gelineau's disease).

1880 Pasteur finds that fowl can acquire immunity to fowl's cholera (a disease which is distinct from human cholera). In his article Sur les maladies virulentes et en particulier sur la maladie appelée vulgairement choléra des poules, he exposes for the first time the principle of non-jennerian vaccination (with Charles Chamberland and Emile Roux (Confolens 1853 - Paris 1933)). He further expands the etiology of many diseases to "germs" (furuncles, osteomyelitis, puerperal fever...). His theory are not universally accepted and he is even provoked to a duel by Jules Guérin, from the Academy of Medicine... He starts his first studies on rabies.

~1880 The work of Charcot results in the use of the concept of "hystérie" as syndromes which takes the appearance of organic diseases without detectable lesions.

1880-1881 Francis Maitland Balfour (1851 - Mont Blanc 1882), brother of the statesman Lord Balfour, in A treatise on comparative embryology observes that the medullary region of the adrenal gland is derived from ectodermal rudiments that also gives rise to parts of the sympathetic nervous system, while the cortex arises from what is now known as mesodermal buds. This work is written explicitely against the contemporary Gegenbaur school.

1880-1890 Walther Flemming, Eduard Strasburger (1844 - 1912), Edouard van Beneden (1845 - 1910) (the son of Pierre-Joseph) and others elucidate the essential facts of cell division and stress the importance of the qualitative and quantitative equality of chromosome distribution to daughter cells. They demonstrate that chromosome doubling occurs by a process of longitudinal splitting. Strasburger describes and names the prophase, metaphase and anaphase stages of chromosomal division.

1881 Cohn publishes Über die Bakterien, die kleinsten lebenden Wesen ( Bacteria, The Smallest of Living Beings) using a word derived from that used previously by Casimir Davaine.

1881 Lacaze-Duthiers founds another French marine laboratory at Banyuls-sur-mer .

1881 Wilhelm Friedrich Philipp Pfeffer (1845–1920) studies respiration, photosynthesis, protein metabolism, and transport in plants in his Pflanzenphysiologie. Ein Handbuch des Stoffwechsels und Kraftwechsels in der Pflanze.

1881 Hermann Munk (1839 - 1912) reports on visual abnormalities after occipital lobe ablation in dogs. He subsequently strongly supports the theory of localisation of specific competences in the brain.

1881 Patrick Geddes (1854 - Montpellier 1932) gives a lecture in Edinburgh where he describes Symbiosis of Alga and Animals. The corresponding work is published in Nature a year later. His was much influenced by anarchist ideas and proposed new ways for city planning.

1881 Karl Brandt (1854 - 1931) gives a lecture in Berlin describing the Zusammenleben (life in common: symbiosis, in modern terms) of algae and animals, and coins the word Zoochlorella conductrix to describe the (green) algae found in the body of Hydrae and Zooxanthella for those (yellow) living in Radiolariae.

1881 Louis-Antoine Ranvier (1835 - 1922) summarizes his work in his Leçons d'anatomie générale faites au Collège de France. He is particularly well known for his description of the myelin insulating sheath, with gaps known as Ranvier's nodes.

1881 Thomas Henry Huxley (Ealing 1825 - 1895) publishes The Connection of the Biological Sciences with Medicine.

1881 Pasteur gives a public demonstration at Pouilly-le-Fort near Paris of the effectiveness of his anthrax vaccine. He demonstrates the ressurrection of the germ from places where diseased animals have been buried. The success of the vaccination protocol is such that in 1882 400,000 animals are vaccinated.

1881 John Venn (Hull 1834 - Cambridge 1923) publishes in London his Symbolic Logic that combines the Boolean logic with a diagrammatic representation at the base of modern Set Theory and illustrates the concept of proximity.

1882 Élie (Ilya Ilich) Metchnikoff (Ivanovska 1845, Paris en 1916) studies the role of phagocytosis in the immune systems of starfish and Daphnia.

1882 Eugen Wilhelm Dinkelacker (1858 - ?), student of Heinrich Irenaeus Quincke (1842 - 1922) defends a thesis on acute œdema with 12 references to previous reports on the pathology. The same year, Quincke writes a summary of it as an original report but with no references to the previous reports (although he was well aware of their existence). To honour Quincke, F Mendel in 1902 published a paper in the Berliner Woshensschrift on circumscribed œdema and proposed the name Quincke œdema.

1882 Kanehiro Takaki (1849 - 1920) following one outbreak of beriberi, reduces the incidence of the disease in the Japanese Navy by dietary improvements.

1882 Wilhelm Theodor Engelmann (Leipzig 1843 - Berlin 1909) in purple bacteria discovers that red light (complementary to the green hue of plants) is the most effective in photosynthesis. His experimental method is one of the most elegant ever conceived (Archiv für Physiologie, 1883).

1882 Koch publishes his method for isolating bacteria in pure culture by plating them on solid media (first gelatin, later agar) and discovers the tuberculosis bacillus (since then named Koch's bacillus).

1882 Strasburger coins the terms "cytoplasm" and "nucleoplasm."

1882 The Misaki Marine Biological Station (MMBS) is created in Japan.

1882 The Albatross, under the direction of the U. S. Fish commission, further explores knowledge of the extent and variety of marine life.

1883 Koch isolates in Egypt the cholera bacillus, now known as Vibrio cholerae.

1883 Camillo Golgi and Santiago Ramon y Cajal (Petilla 1852 - Madrid 1934) develop and refine the silver nitrate staining technique to give a completely new picture of the intricate relationships between neurons.

1883 Max Rubner (München 1854 - 1932) discovers that the metabolic rate is proportional to the surface area of the body. If an animal is N times as big (in height or length) as another, then its skin surface should be N2 times as big, he argues, and its mass (M) N3 times as big. Because the heat an animal can shed is proportional to skin surface, its total metabolic rate - the energy an animal burns in an hour - is proportional to N2, which is itself proportional to M2/3. Finally, the specific metabolic rate - the energy burned per unit mass, which controls pulse rate - is obtained by dividing by M, giving M-1/3. Thus Rubner concludes that the specific metabolic rate should decrease with size as the cube root of body mass.

1883 Pasteur gives a lecture for the Société Chimique de Paris, La Dissymétrie Moléculaire, where he formalizes his scientific attitude, stressing that "savoir s'étonner à propos est le premier mouvement de l'esprit vers la découverte". His knowledge as a student had prepared him to accept that chemicals with the same composition should be identical in their physical properties. However, a note by the crystallographer Eilhard Mitscherlich (1794 - 1863) showed that this was not always so. Hence the scientific question raised by Pasteur: the result of an experiment, based on a well-constructed model, is refuted by an observation asking for new hypotheses and a new model of reality. This is the basis of the Critical Generative Method, which is at the root of all science.

1883 Pierre Émile Duclaux (1840 - 1904) introduces the now widespread convention of designating an enzyme by the name of the substrate on which its action was first reported and adding the suffix - ase.

1883 August Friedrich Leopold Weismann (Frankfurt-am-Main 1834–1914), later famous for his role in separating the role of the body cell ("soma") and its nucleus ("germen") publishes Über die Vererbung (On inheritance), the basis of the germ-plasm theory of heredity which holds that the germ plasm is separate from the somatoplasm and is continuous from generation to generation (The germ-plasm: a theory of heredity).

1883 Victor Alexander Haden Horsley (1857-1916) describes effects of nitrous oxide anesthesia.

1883 Edouard van Beneden in his Recherches sur la maturation de l'œuf proposes the principles of genetic continuity of chromosomes and reports the occurrence of chromosome reduction at germ cell formation. The sperm and egg are haploid and fertilization restores the diploid chromosome number.

1883 Hermann Cohen (1842 - 1918) publishes Das Prinzip der Infinitesimalmethode und seine Geschichte where he places the infinetesimal method of calculus in the context of perception.

1883 Ernst Mach (1838 - 1916) publishes his famous treatise Die Mechanik in ihrer Entwicklung, historisch-kritisch dargestellt, where he exposes his views against the monstrosity of the Absolute Space of Newton. His work is an attempt to eliminate from Science all metaphysical ideas (physics, physiology and psychology in particular).

1883 Wilhelm Roux (Jena 1850 - 1924) describes the time of determination of the main axes of the frog embryo. In the same year he correctly theorizes the role of chromosomes in heredity.

1883 Emil Kraepelin (Neustrelitz 1856 - München 1926) coins the terms "neurosis" and "psychosis".

1883 Karl Georg Friedrich Rudolf Leuckart (1822-1898) and Algernon Phillips Withiel Thomas (Birkenhead 1857–1937) independently work out the life cycle of sheep liver flukes in detail. This is the first time that the complexity of the life cycle of these organisms, including its use of snails as intermediate hosts, is understood.

1883 Theodor Albrecht Edwin Klebs (Königsberg 1834 - Bern 1913) discovers the microbe causing diphteria (Corynebacteirum diphteriae).

1884 Hans Christian Joachim Gram (Copenhagen 1853 - Copenhagen 1938) invents his staining method for the classification of bacteria, still in use today.

1884 Oscar von Hertwig and his brother Richard von Hertwig (Friedberg 1850 - 1937) pupils of Haeckel, publish a series of papers Studien zur Blättertheorie, which deal with the middle germinal layers. In their Untersuchungen zur Morphologie der Zelle, they expose their "coelom" theory, which was meant to answer the question: how does the two layered embryo develop into a higher organization? They coin the term "mesenchyme," a protoplasmic network filled with a fluid intercellular substance. It may be derived from all three germ layers, but is primarily mesodermal in origin, and gives rise to a variety of tissues: primarily connective tissue.

1884 Metchnikoff proposes a cellular theory to explain immunity.

1884 Alexander Rollett (1834 -1 903) and Theodor Engelmann describe the regular sequence of the cross-stripes in muscles.

1884 Eduard Friedrich Wilhelm Pflüger (1829 - 1910), by allowing frog eggs to cleave under pressure, shows that abnormal cleavage patterns do not preclude formation of a normal embryo.

1884 Max Rubner (1854 - 1932) extends the work of Liebig by making quantitative determinations of the energy values of certain foods by calorimetric methods. His work made possible a scientific explanation for metabolism and a basis for the study of comparative nutrition.

1884 Julius Kollman (1834 - 1918) describes the phenomenon of neoteny as observed in the axolotl form of Ambystoma tigrinum.

1884 Svante Arrhenius (1859 - 1927) and Friedrich Wilhelm Ostwald (Riga 1853 - Großbothen, Germany, 1932) independently define acids as substances which release hydrogen ions when dissolved in water to become negatively charged ions highly capable of reacting with other compounds.

1884 Franz Nissl (1860 - Frankfurt am Main 1919) describes the granular endoplasmic reticulum ("Nissl's granules").

1884 Friedrich August Johannes Löffler (1852 - 1915) discovers the microbe of diphteria almost at the same time as Klebs, and that of swine fever.

1884 Emil Adolf von Behring (Hansdorf, 1854 - Marburg, 1917) professor at Marburg, founds serum therapy.

1884 Karl Koller (1857 - 1944) discovers the anesthetic properties of cocaine for surgery of the eye and the ear.

1884 Georges Albert Edouard Brutus Gilles de la Tourette (1857 - 1904) describes several movement disorders (syndromes).

1884-1887 Sigmund Freud (Freiberg 1856 - London 1939) pursues studies on the clinical use of cocaine, while working under Charcot at la Salpétrière.

1884-1888 Identification of the cell nucleus as the basis for inheritance is independently reported by Oscar Hertwig, Eduard Strasburger, Albrecht von Kölliker, and August Weismann.

1885 Paul Ehrlich (Wroclaw 1854 - 1915) notes that dye injected intravenously does not stain the brain tissue. This gives rise to the concept of "blood-brain barrier".

1885 Marcellin Berthelot (1827 - 1907) notices after Jodin a rise in the organic nitrogen content of soils enclosed in pots and left uncultivated for months. Such an increase does not occur if the soil has been sterilized: Fixation directe de l'azote atmosphérique libre par certains terrains argileux (CR Acad Sci 101: 775)

1885 Carl Weigert (Münsterberg 1845 - Frankfurt am Main 1904) introduces hematoxylin to stain myelin.

1885 Ludwig Edinger (1855 - 1918) one of the founders of neuroanatomy, describes the fetal nucleus that will be known as the Edinger-Westphal nucleus.

1885 Karl Rabl (1853 - 1917) discovers the individuality of chromosomes in all stages of the cell cycle.

1885 Flemming observes sister chromatids passing to opposite poles of the cell during mitosis.

1885 Pasteur cures Joseph Meister for rabies in a much advertised experiment. Later he vaccinates Jean-Baptiste Jupille, then Louise Pelletier, who treated too late, dies. A very harsh polemic ensues.

1885 Building up on Denis Papin's marmite, Chamberland finalizes a tool much used by microbiologists, the autoclave.

1885 Theodor von Escherich (Ansbach, 1857 - Wien 1911) identifies the Bacterium coli, now known as Escherichia coli.

1885 Andreas Schimper (1856-1901) names the chromatophores present in plant leaves "chloroplastiden" (chloroplasts).

1885 Physiological description of acétonémie and acétonurie in Traité du Diabète, the french translation of a work by Friedrich-Theodor von Frerichs (1819 - 1885) Über den Diabetes

1885 Emil Kristian Hansen (1842 - 1909) at the Karlsberg laboratory, establishes pure culture yeast starters in the fermentation of beer. He further improves our understanding of fermentation processes.

1885 Wilhelm Roux formulates the "mosaic" theory of development after his work on early development in frog eggs, where he shows that the fate of various cells may differ depending on their position in the embryo.

1885 Frank coins the word "mycorrhiza" for the association of a fungus and plants roots, which constitutes a case of Pilzsymbiosis.

1886 Charles A MacMunn (1852 - 1911) discovers pigments ("myohematins" or "histohematins"), later renamed "cytochromes".

1886 Stephan von Apathy (1863-1923), professor in Koloszvar enters the Stazione zoologica in Napoli, where he describes in parallel with others the "elective" impregnation of nervous tissues with metallic salts.

1886 Galton devises a new useful statistical tool, the correlation table.

1886 Jules-Joseph Déjerine (1849 - 1917) publishes L'hérédité dans les maladies du système nerveux, where he displays the genealogy of several families affected by neurological disorders, in particular forms of muscular dystrophy.

1886 Horsley induces both cretinism and myxoedema in monkeys by experimentally removing the thyroid gland.

1886 Pierre Marie (1853-1940) fully describes the constellation of symptoms (syndrome) termed acromegaly.

1886 Vittorio Marchi (Novellara 1851 - Pavia 1908) publishes a procedure to stain degenerating myelin.

1886 The Woods Hole Marine Biological Station is established near Boston.

1887 The Institut Pasteur is created in Paris.

1887 The National Institutes of Health are established in the USA.

1887 Theodor Heinrich Boveri (Bamberg 1862 - Würzburg 1915) verifies August Weismann's predictions of chromosome reduction by direct observation in Ascaris (Zellenstudien).

1887 Marey invents the "chronophotographe à pellicule mobile". This machine allows him to record 60 images per second on a photographic film.

1887 Sergei Korsakoff (1853-1900) describes symptoms characteristic in alcoholics.

1887 Jacobus Henricus van't Hoff (Rotterdam 1852 - Steglitz 1911) publishes a second edition in French (not his mother tongue) of La Chimie dans l'Espace, dix Années dans l'Histoire d'une Théorie where for the first time he uses the word "chiralité" to express mirror symmetry in molecules.

1887 Alfred Binet (Nice 1857 - Paris 1911) and Charles Fere (1852-1907) publish Le Magnétisme Animal, a study on hypnosis.

1887 Ruggero Oddi (1864 – Bologna 1913) describes sphincteric fibres around the termination of the common bile duct (Oddi's Sphincter) in D'une disposition speciale de l'ouverture du canal cholédoque. Archiv. italiennes de Biologie. These had already been described in 1681 by Glisson.

1887 Joseph Paneth (Vienna 1857 - Vienna 1890), a physiologist who held chairs in the Universities of Breslau and Vienna describes Paneth's Cells- "cellules etroites" of the mucosa of the small intestine in Uber die secernirenden Zellen des Dunndarmschleimhaut published in the Archive für mikroskopische Anatomie.

1887 Oskar (von) Minkowski (1858-1931) famous for his work on the pancreas and diabetes - explicitly makes the connection between acromegaly and a disease of the pituitary gland.

1887 August Weismann elaborates an all-encompassing theory of chromosome behavior during cell division and fertilization and predicted the occurrence of meiosis. Wilhelm Roux puts forth the suggestion that the linearly arranged qualities of the chromosomes are equally transmitted to both daughter cells at meiosis.

1887 Asa Gray (1810-1888) in his Darwiniana; Essays and reviews pertaining to darwinism uses his botanical studies to support darwinism in the USA.

1887 Edouard van Beneden demonstrates chromosome reduction in gamete maturation, thereby confirming August Weismann's predictions. He demonstrates at the same time as Boveri that the central structure of the spindle is an independent cell organ.

1887 Julius Richard Petri (1852–1921) introduces a new type of microbe culture dish for semi-solid media.

1887 George Henry Falconer (Frederick?) Nuttall (San Francisco 1862 - 1937) and Josef Fodor (?-?) find that blood from an animal that had been exposed to anthrax hinders the growth of anthrax bacilli.

1887 Hermann Emil Fischer (Euskirchen 1852 - 1919) elaborates the structural patterns of proteins.

1887 Paul Ehrlich discovers the intravital methylene-blue dyeing method.

1887 Giovani Battista Grassi (1854-1925), professor of zoology in Rome, proposes efficient measures to reduce the incidence of malaria in Italy.

1887 Ernst Haeckel, after studying the radiolarians brought back from the Challenger expedition, elaborates the concept of organic form and symmetry.

1887 Augustus Désiré Waller (Paris 1856 - 1922) son of the physiologist Augustus Volney Waller records the first electrocardiogram.

1887-1904 Nathan Zuntz (1847 - 1920), Julius Geppert (1856 - 1937), Wilbur Olin Atwater (1844 - 1907), and others perfect instruments and techniques for indirect calorimetry to measure the energetics of respiration and general metabolism.

1888 Wilhelm Roux succeeds in the experimental production of a half-embryo by killing one blastomere of the two-celled frog embryo.

1888 Boveri coins the term "centrosome" (later "centriole").

1888 Martinus W Beijerinck (1851 - 1931) succeeds in cultvating a plant associated nodule organism (B. radicicola, now Rhizobium) independently of the plant: Das Wesen und die biologische Bedeutung der Wurzelknöllchen der Erbse (Bot. Zbl. 39: 356)

1888 Pasteur, gravely affected by a cerebral ictus continues nevertheless his work and sends a mission meant to spread the agent of chicken cholera in Australia to destroy the dangerous spreading of rabbits, which pullulate there. After a violent debate the mission is stopped and the experiment is not performed.

1888 Max Fürbringer (1846 - 1920) a pupil of Karl Gegenbaur (Würzburg 1826 - Heidelberg 1903), pursues comparative anatomy studies, published in his monumental treaty on birds Untersuchungen zur Morphologie und Systematik der Vögel.

1888 Heinrich Wilhelm Gottfried von Waldeyer-Hartz (1836 - 1921) names the chromosome after their ability to be stained with haematoxiline.

1888 Hans Chiari (Vienna 1851 - Strasbourg 1916) introduces the term "syringomyelia" to describe a hereditary condition characterized by a syrinx (fluid-filled cyst) in the spinal cord. He later describes abnormalities of the brain at the junction of the skull with the spine ("Chiari malformations" 1891).

1888 Lombroso publishes L'Uomo di Genio (The Man of Genius, published in French by Alcan, L'Homme de Génie in 1889), where he argues that artists are hereditarily insane persons. This work can be considered as a prelude for the concept of "degenerate art", that was so successful during the Nazi dictature.

1889 Wilhelm His (Basel 1831 - Leipzig 1904) coins the term dendrite for some of the appendices in nerve cells.

1889 Albert Charrin (1856 - 1907) et Georges-Henri Roger (Paris 1860 - 1946) show that the agglutination of bacteria or erythrocytes coated with appropriate principles by serum is specific of the chosen bacteria.

1889 Hugo De Vries (1848 - 1935) publishes Intracellulare Pangenesis a theory which is slowly preparing his view of the sudden changes in heredity.

1889 Horsley publishes a somatotopic map of monkey motor cortex.

1889 Galton publishes a treaty on Natural inheritance, formulating the law of ancestral inheritance, a statistical description of the relative contributions to heredity made by one's ancestors.

1889 Richard Altmann (1852 - Leipzig 1901), a German histologist, renames Mischer's "nuclein" nukleinsäure (nucleic acid). He also observes numerous cytoplasmic granules in many types of cell, which he thinks might be "elementary organisms" (described in his book Die Elementarorganismen und ihre Beziehungen zu den Zellen) living in the cytoplasm and names them "bioblasts". We know today that mitochondria belong to these organisms, that Altmann thought to be able to autonomous life.

1889 Carlo Martinotti (Montiglio d’Asti 1859 - Torino 1885) describes cortical neurons with ascending axon (this neuron now bears his name, Martinotti cell).

1889 Franz Carl Muller-Lyer (1857 - 1916) discovers what is now known as the Muller-Lyer visual illusion (<—> looks shorter than >—<).

1889 Charles Edouard Brown-Séquard (1817 - 1894) injects macerated testes from other animals into his own body. He believes to have thus obtained rejuvenating effects. Though erroneous, these conclusions were influential in inaugurating the administration of endocrine gland extracts as an experimental technique. This was also at the root of popular rejuvenation experiments by Serge Voronoff (1866 - 1951) in the following century.

1889 Richard Hertwig and Émile Maupas (1844 - 1916) independently demonstrate the exchange of micronuclei in conjugation by Paramecium.

1889 Giuseppe Peano (Cuneo 1858 - Torino 1932) publishes in Turin his Arithmetices Principia: nova methodo.

1889 A noticeable case of serendipity: Joseph Freiherr von Mering (Köln 1849 - Halle 1908) and Oscar Minkowski accidentally duplicate the symptoms of diabetes in the dog by experimental excision of the pancreas. Several days after the dog's pancreas was removed, they happen to notice a swarm of flies feeding on a puddle of the dog's urine. On testing the urine to determine the cause of the flies' attraction, they realize that the dog has secreted sugar in its urine, a sign of diabetes. They obtain further presumptive evidence for the endocrine function of the islets of Langerhans in 1893.

1889 Geddes publishes The Evolution of Sex where he stresses the importance of cooperation in evolution. The idea of mutualism and symbiosis were popular at the time in political circles influenced by anarchist ideas.

1889 The French mycologist Jean-Paul Vuillemin (Docelles 1861 – Nancy 1932) at a conference in Paris discusses the concepts of symbiose and antibiose, and proposes the term antibiote as the active protecting principle of an organism against pathogens: "principe actif d'un organisme vivant qui détruit la vie des autres pour protéger sa propre vie". As Geddes he emphasises the role of cooperation in evolution.

1889-1904 Ramon y Cajal proposes that nerve cells are, despite their long appendices, independent elements. He publishes his master Treatise Textura del sistema nervioso del hombre y de los vertebrados, where he emphasizes the importance of neuronal connectivity.

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