BazTech - Yadda

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Pochodzenie bursztynu w opiniach polskich przyrodników do połowy XIX wieku

Popiołek J.

Kwartalnik Historii Nauki i Techniki

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2005

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R. 50, nr 3/4

135--148

EN

In antiquity, views on the origin o f amber were divided, but the predominant opinion, expressed by Pliny in Naturalis Historia and by Tacitus in his Germania, was that amber originated from resin. The earliest mention of amber in Polish writing appeared in herbals in the 16th century. Their authors, Stefan Falimirz and Hieronim Spiczyński, also held the veiw that amber was tree resin. In the 16th and 17th centuries, many European scholars came to believe that amber was of non-organic origin and constituted a kind of bituminous substance that flowed out of the ground and solidified on its suface or at the bottom of the sea. As evidence for the idea, they cited the flammability of amber, as well as the false claim that it is malleable immediatley after being extracted from the earth or the sea, and hardens only some time afterwards. The view on the non-organic origin of amber was adopted by Polish authors: Jan Jonston, Wojciech Tylkowski, Gabriel Rzączyński, and Krzysztof Kluk. A key factor involved was the authority enjoyed by such European scholars as Georgius Agricola, Andreas Aurifaber, Girolamo Cardano, and Anselmius Boethius de Boodt. The first decades on the 19th century saw a return to the theory according to which amber originated from the resin of trees. This radical change in views on amber was due largely to analyses of its chemical composition, which showed its similarity to resins, as well as geological research pointing to the cooccurrence of vegetable residue together with amber. The vegetable origin of amber was supported by the chemists F.J. John and J.J. Berzelius. Among Polish investigators of amber, Michał Bonawentura Potulicki, who conducted experiments on the hardening of resins, was the first to support this view. The geologist Gotlieb Pusch came to the same conclusion in the course o f his research on sediments in which amber was found. The last researcher to consider amber to be a bituminous substance was Stanisław Staszic. There were no doubts as to organic origin of amber in the minds of the authors of two monographs devoted to amber (both entitled O bursztynie [ On amber]), Jan Fryer (1833) and Jozef Haczewski (1838). The only moot point was the species of the tree from which amber originated. In fact, that has remained an open question up to the present day.

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Podstawy filozoficzno-teoretyczne makrobiotyki Ch.W. Hufelanda

Bednarczyk A.

Kwartalnik Historii Nauki i Techniki

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2004

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R. 49, nr 3/4

71--106

EN

The main theoretical problem discussed in ther current paper is Ch. W. Hufeland’s concept of the organism as the seat of vital force, presented in his best known work entitled Die Kunst das menschliche Leben zu verlangern (1797). The work bears witness to scholarly influences on Hufeland exerted during the earliest period of his activity by the Weimar circle of naturalists, gathered around J. W. Goethe. Hufeland’s times were a #period of force# in the theory of medicine and biology. Many philosophical-theoretical treatises were published at that time in which the categorical concept that was put at the forefront of discussion was that of the idea of force. Hufeland, however, was not particularly attached to the concept of vital force. In fact he never returned to the idea which he had introduced in his Ideen uber Pathogenie and ultimately consolidated in his The art o f prolonging life', he was too busy in his practical activity as physician, teacher and organizer, as well as public activist. The idea simply reflected the everyday observation, quite typical for a physician, that the phenomena occurring in a living organism are radically different from those that occur in the inanimate world. The concept of vital force allowed Hufeland to describe that distinctness, and not to explain its origin. In the animate body Hufeland was dealing with the same kind of physical and chemical phenomena that he was familiar with in inanimate bodies, but the phenomena involved were taking place in different conditions and due to those conditions they took on a specific form. Without getting to know those phenomena as physical and chemical ones, they could not be understood as biological phenomena either. The main cognitive task was to provide a maximally detailed account of the specificity of those conditions. It was for that purpose that the idea of vital force (Lebenskraft), a peculiar kind of descriptive tool, was to be used $ it was not meant to serve for explanation. The force, thus, constitutes a specific property of the building matter of which bodies designated as organic or animate are formed. The property is not generated by any specific spatial structure of matter, and so it does not have a derivative character with regard to such structure; however, some part of matter, namely organic nature, has been primordially endowed with that property. Thus, being derivative with regard to the property of animateness, the spatial structure of an organic body only subjects to modification the manner in which animatcness manifests itself in particular individuals, species and genera. Corresponding to a particular structure is thus a modification of the force that the stmcture generates. In accordance with the conditions in which the vital force operates (or: in which the property of animateness occurs), the force can assume the following three forms: (a) Organic force, which integrates the building blocks of the body and maintains the cohesion between them. This force transfonns the chemical body into an organic body, subordinating it to organic laws, and partially or completely freeing it from the operation of universal chemical laws. Those laws obtain in a body at all times, but the effects of the transformations which they give rise to are different in organic bodies from those in inorganic bodies. This force is thus manifested by all organic bodies, both plants and animals, as well as by their parts, both solid and liquid. (b) Plastic force, which subjects to transformations, taking place over time, a whole that emerges in an organic way, thus ultimately endowing it with a specific form. This force extends its control over all the purposeful morphogenetic processes occurring in an organic body, not only over the processes of the primary generation of the organismic whole (die Generation) and the formation of its parts (Formatio), but also over the incessant processes of regeneration (die Regeneration) that occur throughout life; it is also responsible for pathological morphogenetic processes. This regeneration of the organism, a process in which plastic force is involved, is a state of dynamic equilibrium maintained by the organism in the course of it incessantly exchanging its building matter with the environment, i.e. in the course of the incessant renewal of that substance throughout life. It is in this generation and regeneration of organismic structure that Hufeland was inclined to see the main vital activity. This variety of the vital force, the plastic force, or the peculiar property of an organic body assuming certain form and preserving that form in the on-going transformations, expressed the essence of life more fully than did the organic force. (c) The force-faculty of responding to stimuli (Reizfahigkeit), which could be termed excitability in the broadest sense. The single vital force acts simultaneously in all its three varieties, i.e. at the same time it annuls chemical laws, it controls the morphogenetic process, and it also responds specifically to internal and external stimuli. Although in particular parts of the organic body and in successive stages of its development those varieties manifest themselves in differing degrees, all of the events happening in the body are generated and exist within the field of action produced by that single force. Life phenomena have, according to Hufeland, a cause which has not yet become subject to experience. The needs of scientific praxis, however, make it advisable that the concept of this unknown cause should be given some designation, in order to be able to use such a concept in presenting views on that peculiar phenomenon of life. In their symbolic language, mathematicians have designated the object of their arithmetical operations as x. Physicists, by contrast, have long described the unknown cause of phenomena as a force. Therefore also Hufeland used the same language convention in biology and adopted for the empirically unknown cause of empirically known phenomena the name of vital force (Lebenskraft). It is worth adding that, from time to time, Hufeland felt sceptical with regard to that unknown cause-force: he doubted whether it would ever be possible to know it, but more frequently he took that lack of knowledge to be a temporary, transitional state. Indeed, he described this force in conditional terms as ’’hitherto unknown” or ”as yet not known”. Hufeland sent his treatise Die Kunst das menschliche Leben zu verlangern to Kant, for whom the treatise became an inspiration for a new, very peculiar dissertation entitled Von der macht des Gemuts durch den blossen Vorsatz seiner krankahften Gefuhle Meister zu sein. Kant incorporated that dissertation as a third part into a larger work that he published: Der Streit der Facultaten, and entitled it Der Streit der philosophischen Facultat mit der medicinischen. Earlier, however, the dissertation had appeared in a medical journal of which Hufeland was an editor. In this way, the physician Hufeland and his Die Kunst das menschliche Leben zu verlangern led to the appearance of a very peculiar work by Kant, which belongs to the later period of the philosopher’s activity. Luckily, letters between Hufeland and Kant relating to the publication of that dissertation have been preserved: they throw some light on the origin of Kant’s dissertation and document the contacts between Hufeland and Kant, which lasted for over a year. The correspondence also provides some information on the last years of the philosopher’s life. These letters, together with two fragments from the first edition of Kant’s dissertation, form a modest collection of documents, which is presented in Polish translation for the first time in the current paper.

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Wokół XVII-wiecznych polemik przyrodniczych

Bieńkowski T.

Kwartalnik Historii Nauki i Techniki

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2001

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R. 46, nr 1

29--40

PL

W ogólnym rozwoju życia naukowego w Europie zachodniej w wieku XVII nurt zainteresowań i badań przyrodniczych był silny. Refleksje teoretyczne i szczegółowe badania empiryczne znajdowały zewnętrzny wyraz w postaci obfitego piśmiennictwa najczęściej o charakterze polemicznym. Walczyli ze sobą na słowa i pióra nie tylko zwolennicy arystotelizmu i nauki nowożytnej, ale również sami twórcy nowej nauki (np. Christian Huygens i Georg Voetius polemizują złośliwie z Kartezjuszem). Wypełnione polemikami są ówczesne podręczniki szkolne z zakresu przyrodoznawstwa zwanego ogólnie „fizyką". Rzecz charakterystyczna, że większość tych zaciętych polemik nie prowadziła do rozwoju nauki, ale raczej kierowała ją na bezdroża. Polemiści często przyjmując za punkt wyjścia przesłanki nieracjonalne zwalczali słuszne obiektywnie poglądy. Jest to zjawisko dobrze znane historykom nauki, wystarczy przypomnieć wielki „spór o heliocentryzm" toczony przy użyciu wszystkich argumentów pozanaukowych1. Omówimy poniżej zapomniane XVII-wieczne polemiki przyrodnicze. W jednej z nich Jan Amos Komeński występuje przeciw fizykalnym tezom Kartezjusza. Następne ukazują dzieje formowania się teorii genezy bursztynu bałtyckiego.

EN

The article discusses two disputes held by naturalists in the 17th century. In the first dispute Jan Amos Komensky attacked the Cartesian doctrine of compression and decompression of air. In the second, the Jesuit, Wojciech Tylkowski, challenged the then prevalent theories of the origin of amber, according to which amber was being created continuously from „earth oil", which was supposed to be flowing to the surface of the earth. Following Pliny, Tylkowski assumed that amber had been formed from the resin of coniferous trees, subsequently submerged by the Baltic Sea.

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Pierwsze organizmy w dziejach ziemi. Komentarz biologiczny do Epok natury G.L. Buffona

Bednarczyk A.

Kwartalnik Historii Nauki i Techniki

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2001

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R. 46, nr 3

31--54

EN

In G.L. Buffon’s multifaceted activity as a naturalist, geology is represented by two voluminous works: Histoire et theorie de la terre (1749) and Les epoques de la nature (1778). Both these treatises shared a cosmogonic hypothesis, according to which the solar system originated as a result of a collision between the Sun and a comet, in which a block of matter that was wrested from the Sun rushed through space and disintegrated into smaller fragments, thus supplying the necessary building material for the future planets. What the treatises differed in was that the second of them contained a much more detailed account of the Earth’s past and of the history of the ever increasing number of living organisms that inhabited the Earth. Les epoques de la nature, though concerned mainly with major cosmogonic-geological problems, dealt with many interesting theoretical questions relating to biology. One of them, namely the question o f how the first organisms in the Earth’s past had emerged, was not presented in the treatise in a sufficiently clear way: hence, the present paper is going to provide an elucidation of the views held by Buffon on that matter. In the third out of the six epochs distinguished by Buffon in the Earth’s past, the planet had cooled down to such an extent that the water vapour surrounding it could already be transformed into water, which filled all the hollow parts in the Earth’s crust, thus forming the seas; in those primeval seas there emerged the first living organisms. In Les epoques de la nature, however, Buffon let this remarkable act in the Earth’s history remain without any comment or explanation. In his biological deliberations in that work, he concentrated on completely different questions - those relating to palaeontology, biogeography and ecology; meanwhile some explanation concerning the origin of life could be provided by a conception whose subject-matter had to do with beings and events on the suborganismal level. Indeed, Buffon did develop such a concept and it is known by the name of the conception o f organic molecules. The conception was developed to explain physiological phenomena that take place in already existing organisms and that are the object of direct experience. However, the conception can be extrapolated and used for phenomena that occurred in those epochs in the past where no organism had yet existed; this can be done in order to explain the origin of living organisms, i.e. to do what is clearly missing in Les epoques de la nature. The present article tries to justify the possibility of using the concept of organic molecules in such a way. Above all, it draws attention to the easily noticeable and notable tendency in the way that the conception evolved and it also highlights the fact that, in describing events from the Earth’s past, Buffon did introduce (albeit only at one point in Les epoques de la nature) the motif of organic molecules. Buffon’s organic molecules, which constituted the building blocks of an organism, were endowed with life, were infinite in number, were indestructible and - at least in the first version of the conception - showed no qualitative differentiation; the only variability that they exhibited related to motion. The peculiarity of Buffon’s conception was that matter was primarily (and not derivatively) divisible into non-living matter and living matter, for life as such constituted a property of matter. Life was thus not a state into which non-living matter passes when subjected to the action of hypothetical forces that endow it with biological organization. Hence, life should not be treated as a function of that organization, for it is an irreducible (in all the senses of the word) property of mat mass, attraction etc. Matter endowed with life thus appears in the form of an assemblage of organic molecules which are carriers of that specific quality. In Buffon’as early version of the conception, the molecules were qualitatively homogeneous, i.e. all of them simply had life ascribed to them. Later, the living organic molecules turned out to be also most highly differentiated in qualitative terms, for they carried full information on where in the organismal whole that they were forming they should have their place. They were thus endowed with generic specificity (they made up an individual of a particular species) and they were specific with regard to the organs they formed (they formed muscles, bones, nerves, etc.) An important part o f Buffon’s conception was the never explicitly formulated principle of conservation (constancy) of life, according to which the molecules not only were not subject to disintegration and did not undergo internal transformation, but they did not come into being de novo either; the principle thus excluded the possibility of spontaneous generation. The notion of spontaneous generation found in Buffon’s works did not embrace the generation of living organisms from inorganic substances or even from organic ones (in the contemporary sense of those terms). What Buffon regarded as spontaneous generation was the formation of random conglomerations of organic molecules that did not use the information, which they were carrying, on their place in the organism; in that way there also formed the animalcula, which only a whole century later were to be refashioned as the contemporary spermatozoa. Thus, in the process that Buffon referred to as spontaneous generation, and which he conceived in a way different from the generally accepted one, there was neither the emergence of life as a new state or new quality of matter (for that state and that quality were a property of the organic molecules), nor was there any generation of entities called organisms, as understood at that time. In the period of over thirty years that spanned the time when Buffon developed his conception of organic molecules and the time when he started to work on Les epoques de la nature (1778), the scientist’s views on spontaneous generation had undergone a significant transformation. This transformation is documented in an article contained in the fourth supplement to the Histoire naturelle, which was published a year before the fifth supplement containing Les epoques de la nature. In that article Buffon introduced an idea of great theoretical relevance, namely the idea that spontaneous generation was the primary way in which living organisms originated. Buffon also put forward the following daring hypothesis (he made a mention of it also in Les epoques de la nature)', let us imagine that the Supreme Being has simultaneouly deprived all earthly organisms of life, by bringing about a disorganization of the organic molecules that formed them, without, however, the molecules undergoing any change - either in terms of their number, or in terms of their specific properties (the principle of conservation of life). The molecules that remained at large would then begin to cluster and form new bodies, which would take on the form of organisms. Some of the less perfect ones, would be endowed only with the ability to feed, while others, the more complex ones, would be able to reproduce. In Buffon’s hypothesis we can observe the aforementioned evolution of his views on the conception of organic molecules: all the information on the spatial structure of the organisms (and of the features of the species) was now contained in the very molecules themselves. After that hypothetical catastrophe, new forms would emerge, not all of which would be perfect. Among them would be forms that were not perfectly organized, unable to reproduce, or simply those that were damaged; those would disappear. New beings that managed to survive would be slightly smaller than their predecessors, for in the period that separated the two acts of creation, there would be a significant dissipation of the the heat concealed within the Earth. Heat, in Buffon’s conception, played an important role in influencing the ways of formation and the size of the emergent living beings, but was not the factor that triggered their spontaneous generation. Under the influence of heat, the living organic molecules would only display more fully the specific features of life and would begin to participate in the physiological transformations of the organism that had become their habitat. Heat, it could be said, would „bring to life“ the organic molecules and set them in motion, while non-living matter would serve as the ground upon which their usual activity could develop: namely, they would generate living bodies by combining with one another due to their specific affinity. Thus, when the Earth cools off completely and there is no longer the heat to stimulate organic molecules to action, and when the organisms inhabiting the Earth perish, releasing at their death and disintegration the molecules that they contain within themselves, the molecules will not cease to exist, they will not be changed, and there will be no decrease in their number; they will only cease to manifest their presence in this excessively cooled-off world. Once the molecules are supplied with sufficient amounts of heat, they will regain their former mobility and will re-enter into the circulation of living substance. It can be assumed that as a result o f some successive cosmic catastrophe, the molecules could resume their function once again - that of generating living organisms, beings that they had once been forced to abandon. In the course of geological transformations life has not appeared on Earth, but only made manifest its eternal presence here (just as it did on other planets), whenever the conditions for that were favourable, and it was heat that had a crucial role to play in creating conditions favourable for the development of life forms. Life, according to Buffon, was as old as the same age as equal age with matter and shared its history; it constituted a form o f existence of one of the two varieties of matter - the one that had the form of organic molecules of living matter, which has always accompanied non-living matter on Earth (and in the Cosmos at large).