CHAPTER
XII
“SCIENCE IS PREVISION”
THE science of stereo-chemistry, or
chemistry in space. was founded by Pasteur in 1860. He it was who then set up
what he termed “enantiomorphism” to describe the peculiarities of the isomeric
naturally occurring’ organic compounds. As every teacher in any medical school
is well aware, the science of chemistry plays too unimportant a part in the
education of the medical student. Therefore it is not strange that the stereo-chemistry
of naturally occurring organic compounds should have been so neglected in the
practice of medicine, in what is wrongly designated “medical science.” If the
neglect be excusable in medicine, the like may not be said for natural science.
Leaving physiology aside, for all the use hitherto made of its findings in zoology
and embryology, in animal biology in a wide sense, stereochemistry might never
have had any existence. For instance, practically all the beliefs—superstitions
one might truly term them—of embryologists, such as the germ-layer theory, the
recapitulation theory, epigenesis or direct development, etc., date back to a
time when there was no known science of stereo-chemistry. Except by the writer,
no attempt has ever been made by any other embryologist—least of all by Haeckel
or Weismann—to bring the doctrines of embryology into line with the
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