(c) & Disclaimer: Note that this is a biased choice of dates relevant to biology, obtained by compiling many different sources, often using the original texts and not the WWW only; note that care has been taken to check information and rewrite it when needed, however it is likely that they still contain many errors; the links are chosen to be as diverse as possible, they do not engage the responsability of the author; please send comments and corrections here). Greek words require that your "Symbol" font is activated.

1850-1874

1900-1919

Causeries

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, 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 (? - 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 (1808-1886) in The Functions of the Braindescribes 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.

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

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 micro-organisms that produce them.

1876 Robert Koch (Clausthal 1843 - 1910) On the Etiology of Anthrax 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.

1876 Ferdinand Cohn studies the formation of spores in Bacillus subtilis. Cohn also assists Robert Koch in his work on anthrax.

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 (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 eugenics school during the XXth century) and aims at being based on scientific objectivity (he 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, he 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 and correspondence with John Tyndall (Carlow 1820 - accidentally poisoned by his wife, 1893) on spontaneous generations. 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 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.

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 (? - ?) discovers the etiological agent of gazeous gangrene (now Clostridium perfringens). Together they also discover antibiose i.e. the bacterial antagonism with the anthrax becterium (bactéridie charbonneuse). Pasteur wrote 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».

1878 Ernst Carl 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".

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.

1879-1882 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 Island life.

1880 Charles Louis Alphonse Laveran (1845-1922), while serving as a surgeon in Algeria, demonstrates that the causative agent in malaria is a protozoon and publishes his observations in a treaty the following year: Nature parasitaire des accidents de l'impaludisme.

1880 Friedrich Sigmund Merkel (Nüremberg 1845 - Göttingen 1919) in Uber 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 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 extends 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 "hystérie" as syndromes which takes the apparence of organic diseases without detectable lesions.

1880-1881 Francis Maitland Balfour (1851 - Mont Blanc 1882), brother of the statesman Lord Balfour, in his Treatise of 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 Bacteria, The Smallest of Living Organisms using a word derived from that used previously by Casimir Davaine.

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

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 publiched in Nature a year later. His was much influenced by anarchist ideas and proposed new ways for city planning.

1881 Karl Brandt (?-?) gives a lecture in Berlin describing the Zusammenleben (life in common: symbiosis, in modern terms) of algae and animals, and coins the word Zoochlorella to describe the 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.

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 which 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 Dinkellacker (?-?), student of Heinrich Iraneus Quincke (1842-1922) publishes a thesis in on acute oedema with 12 references to previous reports. 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 oedema and proposed the name Quincke oedema.

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 (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 Flemming publishes his treaty, Zellsubstanz, Kern und Zellteilung.

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 M^2/3. 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 Mitschelich 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 Uber die Vererberung.

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.

1883 Ernst Mach (1838-1916) publishes his famous treatise Die Mechanik in ihrer Entwicklung, historishkritisch 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 - München1926) coins the terms "neurosis" and "psychosis".

1883 Karl Georg Friedrich Rudolf Leuckart (1822-1898) and AP Thomas (?-?) 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.

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

1884 Oscar Hertwig and his brother Richard Hertwig (Friedberg 1850 - ?) pupils of Haeckel, publish a series of papers Studien zue 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 Rollet (1834-1903) and Theodor Engelmann ascertain 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 JS Löffler (1852 - 1915) discovers the microbe of diphteria and that of swine fever.

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

1884 Karl Koller (1857-?) 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 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 treats Joseph Meister for rabies in a much publicisized 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 description of acétonémie and acétonurie.

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.

1885 August Weismann formulates the "germ plasm" theory which holds that the germ plasm is separate from the somatoplasm and is continuous from generation to generation.

1886 Abbe develops the apochromatic microscope lens.

1886 C.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 to 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. 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 uses his botanic 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 and elaborated 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 Zuntz (?-?), Geppert (?-?), Wilbur Olin Atwater (1844-1907), and others perfect instruments and techniques for indirect calorimetry.

1888 Wilhelm Roux's 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 Pasteur, gravely affected by a cerebral ictus continues nevertheless his work and sends a mission in Australia to destroy the dangerous spreading of rabbits, which pullulate there. After 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 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 -Strasbour 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 P. Charrin (?-?) and Roger (?-?) show that the agglutination of bacteria or erythrocytes coated with appropriate principles by serum is specific.

1889 Hugo De Vries (1848-1935) publishes Intracellular 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" "nucleic acid". He also observes numerous cytoplasmic granules in many types of cell, which he thinks might be "elementary organisms" living in the cytoplasm and names them "bioblasts".

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.

1889 Richard Hertwig and Emile 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.

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 The French mycologist P Vuillemin (? - ?) 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".

1889 Geddes publishes The Evolution of Sex where he stresses the importance 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 emphsizes the importance of neuronal connectivity.

1890 Richard Altmann in Die Elementarorganismen describes procedures for staining organelles (now known as mitochondria), studies their distribution, and postulates them to have metabolic and genetic autonomy. This triggers a long debate between scientists supporting his views and scientists seing these granules (which he called bioblasts) as staining artefacts. His motto here is "omne granulum e granulo"...

1890 Pierre Mazé (1868 - ?) at the Institut Pasteur isolates from root tubercles bacteria that Liebig had claimed were fixing nitrogen for some plants (Leguminosae), a clear case of symbiosis.

1890 The numerical equality of paternal and maternal chromosomes at fertilization is established by Boveri in Germany and Jean-Louis-Léon Guignard (1852-1928) in France.

1890 Theobald Smith (Albany 1859 - 1934) pioneer of american microbiology, demonstrates the transmission of a disease by an arthropod vector: the infection of cattle with the sporozoan Babesia by the tick Boophilus. This will trigger spreading of a new concept in the transmission of diseases.

1890 Wilhelm Ostwald, teacher of Arrhenius, van t'Hoff and Nernst, establishes the first bases of the membrane theory of nerve conduction.

1890 William James (New York City 1842 - Chocorua 1910), the brother of the novelist Henry, publishes his Principles of Psychology, where he discusses the problem of consciousness in terms similar to those of Thomas Huxley: we are conscious automata.

1890 Sergei Nikolaevitch Winogradsky (Kiev, Russia, 1856 - Brie Compte-Robert, France, 1953) isolates nitrifying bacteria from soil. He invents a device known after his name (the Winogradsky column) to explore microbial communities in soil layers.

1890 von Behring discovers antibodies.

1891 Eduard Buchner (1860-1917) professor of chemistry in Berlin demonstrates that alcoholic fermentation is not provoked by a vital action of yeast-fungi, but that a product they make are responsible of the process.

1891 Hans Buchner proposes the existence of antibacterial proteins in blood serum which he calls "alexines". This begins a protracted debate with Metchnikoff, who championed a cellular theory of immunity. Both were right...

1891 Quincke introduces the use of spinal lumbar puncture as a diagnostic and therapeutic aid.

1891 Luigi Luciani (1840-1919), who investigates localization in the brain,publishes a manuscript on the cerebellum.

1891 Waldeyer proposes the neuron theory of the nervous system (coining the term "neuron" for the nervous cells thought to be responsible for all nervous system activity).

1891 George Redmayne Murray (1865-1939) prepares emulsions of dried sheep thyroid in glycerine. He uses these with considerable success on patients suffering from myxoedema (hypothyroidism).

1891 Hans Dreisch (1867-1941) at the Stazione zoologica di Napoli discovers that each of the first several blastomeres of the sea urchin egg would, after being separated by shaking, develop into a complete embryo. Dreisch's theory of totipotency contradicts Wilhelm Roux's mosaic theory.

1891 Dareste publishes his Recherches sur la production artificielle des monstruosités ou essais de tératogenie expérimentale.

1891 Alexandre Calmette (Nice 1863 - Paris 1933) creates the Institut de Bactériologie d'Indochine, to become the Institut Pasteur of Saïgon in 1904.

1891 Marie Eugène François Thomas Dubois (1858 - 1940) discovers the Java Man and names it Pithecanthropus erectus, now known as Homo erectus.

1892 Dimitri Iosifovich Ivanovski (1864-1920) staying in Crimea to study an unusual disease infecting tobacco plants, discovers a disease-causing agent smaller than bacteria: virus. Taking leaves from tobacco plants which had a common disease called mosaic, he extracts their sap and rubs it onto healthy leaves. These leaves soon showed symptoms of the disease. He performes the experiment again, but this time he filters the sap through ceramic filters with pores so small that they retained all the bacteria known at that time. He rubs more tobacco leaves with the filtered sap, but once again they are infected. Ivanovsky, who was a prudent scientist (as all scientists should be), did not interpret his results as a discovery. He simply records in his laboratory notebook his opinion that this contamination was probably caused by a toxin secreted by the bacteria, and which was not retained by the filter.

1892 Albert Frank publishes his Lehrbuch der Botanik in which he describes many cases of symbiosis. Curiously, although this book is widely spread, the origin of the term "symbiosis" ("Symbiose" in German and in French) is often ascribed to Anton de Bary (see 1877-1879 above).

1892 The publication of August Weismann's book Das Keimplasma (The Germ Plasm) emphasizes meiosis as an exact mechanism of chromosome distribution.

1892 TA Palm (?-?) discovers a relationship between the geographic distribution of rickets and the amount of sunlight in the region.

1892 Salomen Eberhard Henschen (1848 - Uppsala 1930?) localizes the centre of vision in the brain to calcarine fissure.

1892-1902, Jacob Johann von Uexküll (Keblas 1864 - Capri 1944) is the head of the Physiology department at the Stazione zoologica in Napoli, and, for ten years, he carries out original and ingenious experiments on the nervous and muscular systems of marine animals. Uexküll is a pioneer of modern behavioral biology, investigating the environmental relations, the ‘sphere of function’ as he calls it, which connect the individual to its environment.

1893 Paul Emil Flechsig (Zwickau 1847-1929) where myelinization occurs,that certain regions of the brain have a mature appearance at birth, whereas other cortical areas including continue to develop, as though their maturation depended on the acquisition of experience.

1893 Roscoe Pound (1870 - 1964) publishes an article, Symbiosis and Mutualism, in which, reasoning in terms of costs and benefits, he tries to separate the two concepts. Mutualism requires that there is mutual benefit, with one partner always dominates, while there may be independent life of the partners. In contrast symbiosis assumes that the partners are no longer autonomous entities in the absence of each other. In this work he wrongly argues that microbes are always parasites (acting as "thieves").

1893 Charles Scott Sherrington (London 1852 - Eastbourne 1952) working on spinal reflexes, coins the term "proprioceptive".

1893 Adrien Loir (Lyon 1862 - Le Havre 1941) creates the Service des vaccinations antirabiques et des fermentations, to become the Institut Pasteur de Tunis in 1900.

1893 Oscar Hertwig obtains twin embryos in the newt by constricting the egg.

1893 Eduard and Hans Buchner find a way to make a cell-free liquid extract of microorganisms. They were using a yeast extract for pharmaceutical studies and added a thick sugar syrup to stop any bacterial action. They fully expected the sugar to act as a preservative, but it had the opposite effect and carbon dioxide was produced. The sugar had fermented, producing carbon dioxide and alcohol, in the same way as if whole yeast cells had been present.

1893 Shosaburo Watase (1862-1929), a Japanese zoologist trained in America, suggests that the particles present in cells are symbionts.

1893 Thomas Henry Huxley publishes his simplistic but fashionable Evolution and Ethics, which states that human morality is not in line with natural selection processes. He argues that the struggle for existence (curiously only understood as a "fight", the strongest being the necessary winner) is at the basis of all evolution.

1893 Ferdinand Blum (1865 – 1959) uses formaldehyde as a brain fixative.

1893 Wilhelm Ostwald proves that enzymes are catalysts.

1893 Louis Antoine Marie Joseph Dollo (1857 - 1931) points out that in evolution it is harder to gain a complex feature than to lose it, hence the irreversibility of evolution ("Dollo's law").

1893 Bartolomeo Gosio (1863—1944) publishes his study on the toxic gases generated by microbial activity on arsenic compounds: Action de quelques moisissures sur les composés fixes d'arsenic. "Gosio gas" is the garlic scentingnow known as trimethylarsine.

1893 Wilhelm His investigates the specialized conducting tissue of the atrio-ventricular node and bundle of the heart.

1894 Dreisch proposes a new version of epigenesis, that all nuclei of an organism are equipotential but varied in their activity in accordance with the differentiation of tissues.

1894 William Bateson's (Whitby 1861 - 1926) Materials for the Study of Variation emphasizes the importance of discontinuous variations, foreshadowing the rediscovery of Mendel's work.

1894 Karl Pearson (London 1857 - London 1936) publishes the first in a long series of contributions to the mathematical theory of evolution. Methods for analyzing statistical frequency distributions are developed in detail.

1894 Emil Fischer conduces an extensive series of investigations which still form the basis for our notions of enzyme specificity. He coins the lock and key (Schloss und Schlüssel) metaphor that is still in use today.

1894 Conway Lloyd Morgan (1852-1936) establishes the basic principles in the study of animal behavior including his famous canon which states that the actions of an animal should be interpreted in terms of the simplest mental processes.

1894 William Maddock Bayliss (1860-1924) and Ernest Henry Starling (1866-1927) study electric currents in the mammalian heart.

1894 Alexandre Yersin (Morges 1863 - Nha Trang 1943) isolates and identifies the bacillus responsible for plague in Hong Kong. This bacillus is now named Yersinia pestis, after his name.

1894 George Oliver (1841-1915) and Edward Albert Sharpey-Schäfer (1850 - 1935) first demonstrate the action of a specific molecule, later named hormone: the effect of an extract of the adrenal gland on blood vessels and muscle contraction. Upon injection into normal animals it produced a striking elevation in blood pressure.

1894 Franz Nissl (Frankenthal, Pfalz, 1860 - München, 1919) stains neurons with dahlia violet.

1894-1897 Born (?-?) makes heteroplastic grafts of parts of frog and toad embryos.

1895 Wilhelm His first uses the term hypothalamus.

1895 Philipp Stoehr (1849-1911) states that the hypochord plays no role in directing the formation of any other embryonic structure.

1895 ThD Dunn (?-?) finds a new proof of brain hemisphere dominance in Double hemiplegia with double hemianopsia and loss of geographical centre.

1895 Wilhelm Konrad Roentgen (1845-1923) discovers X-rays, which are soon to be applied in the visualization of bodily structures and in the induction of genetic mutations (both intentionally and accidentally).

1895 Arrhenius suggests that carbon dioxyde might be of importance in the increase of the Earth temperature, in his theory of the "warm green house".

1895 Quincke performs lumbar punctures to study the nature of the cerebrospinal fluid.

1895 Charles Ernest Overton (1865-1933) proposes that the cellular membranes consist of a peculiar category of molecules that he calls lipoids, and that element dissolved in these permeate the cell walls.

1895 The journal Wilhelm Roux's Archiv für Entwicklungsmechanik der Organismen is founded.

1895 Jules Henri Poincaré (Nancy 1854 - Paris 1912) probably the last "universal" mathematician poses the mathematical foundations of what would become Einstein's theory of relativity and publishes his Analysis situs, which creates the domain of Topology. He is recognized with Lorenz and Einstein as the father of the theory of special relativity. His importance in science is stressed by his many books on the nature of science and discovery. For biology, the sentence he states about mathematics justifies the present chronology!

1895 David Bruce (Melbourne 1855 - ?) investigates the life cycle of the protistan blood parasite now named after him Trypanosoma brucei and the role of the tse-tse fly in its transmission.

1895 Adolf Magnus-Levy (1865-1955) finds by means of direct calorimetric measurements that persons with myxoedema have a lowered heat production. He also finds that administration of thyroid preparations to normal or myxoedemic patients raises the metabolic level.

1895 Jules Bordet (Soignies, Belgique, 1870 - Bruxelles, 1961) discovers, in the laboratory of Metchnikoff at the Institut Pasteur in Paris the fixation of the complement. The complement fixation assay can be used to look for the presence of i) specific antibody or ii) specific antigen in a patient's serum.

1895 Theobald Smith produces a hemorrhagic deficiency disease in guinea pigs deprived of leafy foods.

1895 Back from Hong Kong, Yersin stops in Nhatrang, where he begins to study bovine plague and creates the Institut Pasteur de Nhatrang (Viêt-Nam).

1895 James Mark Baldwin (1861-1934) publishes Mental development in the child and the race. He is one of the first to understand the importance of alteration of individuals during ontogeny. The "Baldwin effect" states that selection of genotypes will be channeled in the same direction as nonhereditary adaptive modifications, so that the modal behavior of all animals in a species is rather constant despite different experiences.

28 december 1895 Antoine Lumière (1840 - 1911), the father of August and Louis organizes the first public presentation of cinematograph, with a small orchestra to fill the acoustic side.

1895-ca 1900 Yen Fu (1853-1920) translates into Chinese many famous Western works, introducing philosophy and science in a modern form in China. This is the first introduction of Science as we understand it in China. The major emphasis is however still on ethics and politics (translation of L'esprit des Lois from Montesquieu, Evolution and Ethics of Thomas Huxley, On Liberty, but also A System of Logic by John Stuart Mill...).

1896 Leçons sur la Cellule is published by Louis Félix Henneguy (1850–1928).

1896 John Scott Haldane (1860-1936) publishes an important report, Causes of Death in Colliery Explosions showing that the miners did not die of the blasts but were succumbing to carbon monoxide poisoning.

1896 Conway Morgan (1852 - 1936) publishes his treaty Habit and Instinct summarizing his first behavioural experiments.

1896 The Russian Hydrographic Survey of the Biology of Lake Baikal , led by F. Drizhenko, is undertaken. This survey finds several unique endemic freshwater animals that have become extinct in the rest of the world.

1896 Alexandr Fiodorovitch Brandt (?-?) in Saint Petersburg writes an essay where he endeavours to establish that the "struggle for existence" is only one component of evolution, while "mutual aid" is always an important factor.

1896 Kölliker coins the term axon.

1896 Eugen Baumann (1868 - 1933) reports that the thyroid contains an appreciable concentration of iodine in organic combinations. He also reported that persons inhabiting coastal areas contained more thyroid iodine than persons living further inland.

1896 Herbert Edward Durham (1866 - 1945) and Max von Gruber (Wien 1853 - Berchtesgaden 1927) discover specific agglutination by serum, and Fernand Isidore Widal (Dellys, Algérie, 1862 - Paris, 1929) finds that blood serum from a typhoid patient agglutinates typhoid bacilli, thus introducing the process of serologic diagnosis.

1896 Max von Frey (1852 - 1932) uses human hairs or other bristles mounted in a handle to map cutaneous sensitivity on a piece of skin to test the somatosensory system.

1896 Camillo Golgi discovers what isnow known as the Golgi apparatus.

1896 Joseph François Félix Babinski (1857 - 1932) describes what is now known as the "Babinski Reflex" or "Signe de Babinski", an inversion of the cutaneous foot sole reflex, which is a proof of a lesion in the pyramidal pathway.

1896 Another spectacular case of serendipity: Antoine Henri Becquerel (Paris 1852 - Le Croisic 1908) studies, at the suggestion of Poincaré, the "X"-rays just discovered by Röntgen, and, after having kept some uranium salts on a photograph plaque that he could not use because the day was cloudy, finds that the plaque looks as if it had been exposed to light. He then shows that all uranium salt emit rays which can react with photograph plaques in the dark. This was the discovery of radioactivity, that, during forty years was used to investigate the nature of atoms.

1896 Albrecht Kossel (1853 - 1927) discovers histidine.

1896 Emil Kraepelin (Neusterlitz 1856 - München 1926), considered as the father of modern psychiatry, describes "dementia praecox".

1897 Karl Ferdinand Braun (Fulda 1850 - Brooklyn 1918) invents the cathode-ray tube for use as the oscilloscope.

1897 Christiaan Eijkman (Nijkerk, 1858 - Utrecht, 1930) produces experimental polyneuritis in chickens by feeding them polished rice, and calls attention to rice hulls as containing the preventive agent of human beriberi.

1897 Wilhelm Ostwald demonstrates that the iodine of the thyroid is firmly bound to a globulin-like protein and introduces the term "thyroglobulin".

1897 In The Will to Believe and other Essays in Popular Philosophy William James remarks that "he who says 'Better go without belief forever than believe a lie!' merely shows his own preponderant private horror of becoming a dupe."

1897 Oscar Hertwig centrifuges frog eggs and analyzes the effect of yolk distribution on cleavage.

1897 Ivan Petrovich Pavlov (Ryazan 1849 - 1936) publishes his work on the physiology of digestion, but he is mainly known for his work on conditioned behavior.

1897 Albert Schneider (?-?) at the University of Illinois elaborates on Frank, Boveri, Altmann and other's views about genetic continuity of the granules present in plant and animal cells, stating: "The plasmic bodies, such as chlorophyll granules, leucoplastids, chromoplastids, chromosomes, centrosomes, nucleoli, etc., are perhaps simply the symbionts comparable to those in the less highly specialized symbiosis."

1897 Joseph John Thomson (1856-1940) discovers the electron.

1897 Sherrington coins the term "synapse" to describe contact between nerve cells.deduces the existence of synapses by showing that individual nerve cells can exert integrative influences on other nerve cells by graded excitatory or inhibitory synaptic actions.

1897 Thomas Hunt Morgan (Lexington 1866 - 1945) publishes his first key work: The Development of the Frog's Egg; An Introduction to Experimental Embryology.

1897 Eduard Buchner (1860-1917) resolves the Liebig-Bernard-Pasteur controversy by producing fermentation in cell-free yeast extracts containing zymase. Although he demonstrates that living yeast cells are not necessary for fermentation, this in no way proved that Liebig's proposed mechanism was correct.

1897 Felix Hoffman (1868 - 1946), a chemist working in alaboratory owned by Friedrich Bayer, in Elberfeld, Germany, was stimulated byearlier work on acetylation and he formulated a pure and stable form of acetylsalicylic acid. Hoffman's work was motivated by the suffering of his father, who hadsevere arthritis, and could not tolerate salicylic acid. Hoffman and Bayer give the name A-spirin to the new preparation. This appears to come from acetylation (A-), together with Spirin, part of the name for Meadow-sweet (Spiraea ulmaria), a plant rich in salicylates.

1897 Gabriel Bertrand (1867-1962) coins the term "coenzyme" to designate inorganic substances which were necessary to activate certain enzymes.

1897 John Jacob Abel (Cleveland 1857 - 1938) and Albert Cornelius Crawford (?-?) isolate the first hormone, later named epinephrine by Jokichi Takamine (Takaoka 1854 - New York 1922).

1897 The Canadian Geological Survey finds rich fossil beds containing Upper Cretaceous dinosaur fauna along the Red Deer River in Alberta.

1897 A Huot (?-?) discovers that some fish have aglomerular kidneys, proving that renal tubules can secrete and resorb substances.

1897 Wilhelm Friedrich Philipp Pfeffer (1845–1920) studies respiration, photosynthesis, protein metabolism, and transport in plants in his Pflanzenphysiologie.

1897 Nicholas Kulchitsky (Kronstadt 1856 - London 1925), an anatomist and a histologist, after teaching first in his own University of Kharkov became Professor of Histology, discovers a new type of cells (Kulchitsky's Cells) in the epithelium of the small intestine (published in Archive für mikroskopische Anatomie). Later was appointed Director of Education in Kasan and in 1915 went to St. Petersburg. After the revolution came to England and worked at University College, in London..

1897 Thèse de Médecine of Ernest Duchesne (1874-1912): "Concurrence vitale" between Penicillium and bacteria.

1897 Ronald Ross (Almora, India 1857 - 1932) elucidates the life-cycle (alternation of generations) of Plasmodium (the malarial agent) in the body of its two hosts, a blood warmed vertebrate and a mosquito.

1897-1898 Carl Benda (1857-1933) develops a new staining method which allows him to identify Altmann's bioblasts, which he renames mitochondria (from mitoV: thread, and condroV: granule) and Camillo Golgi describes Golgi bodies in great detail and name them. What is now known as the Golgi apparatus had been first observed in 1855, but Golgi's silver nitrate impregnation method made more detailed observation of this important inclusion possible in the nerve cells he studied.

1898 John Newport Langley (Newbury 1852 - 1925) works on nerve conduction, by blocking neuron functioning by nicotine. He separate between the Central Nervous System, and the autonomous nervous systems.

1998 Edmund B. Wilson (1856-1939) presents a famous lecture wherein he concluded that all spiralians - molluscs, flatworms, annelids, and nemerteans - share a common evolutionary ancestry.

1898 Arthur Croft-Hill (?-?) produces the first enzymatic synthesis, that of isomaltose.

1898 Sherrington describes decerebrate rigidity in the cat.

1898 Charles Reid Barnes (1858-1910) coins the term "photosynthesis."

1898 Karl Gegenbaur, after having worked on invertebrates, investigates the evolution of the egg, trying to substantiate darwinism through comparative anatomy. He summarizes his study of the skeleton in his Vergleichende Anatomie der Wirbeltiere. Using Huxley's dogmatic style he ridicules the idea that the skull is composed of vertebrae showing that there is continuous evolution of the cranium from sharks to humans. Investigation in homology with a phylogenetical purpose is the aim of his research.

1898 Edward Lee Thorndike (1874-1949) describes the puzzle box for experiments in psychology.

1898 Plague epidemic in Nhatrang. Yersin stops the spreading of the disease.

1898 Sergey Gavrilovich Navashin (?-?) and Léon Guignard discover independently the developmental origin of endosperm from double fertilization in angiosperms.

1898 Angelo Ruffini (Arquata del Tronto 1864 - 1929) using gold chloride identifies encapsulated nerve endings later known as Ruffini corpuscles.

1898 Walther Flemming determines the chromosome number as 24 pairs in Man.

1898 Henry Fairfield Osborn (1857-1935) enunciates the concept of adaptive radiation in evolution. This leads him slowly to support eugenist theories.

1898 André Thiroux (1869-1960) creates the Institut Bactériologique in Tananarive, to become the Institut Pasteur de Madagascar in 1927.

1898 The French veterinarians C Besnoit (?-?) and C Morel (?-?) describe an unusual disease in sheep, tremblante, known as scrapie in English, the first type of known spongiform encephalopathies.

1898 Martinus Willem Beijerinck (Amsterdam, 1851 - 1931) surmises that the tobacco mosaic causing agent is an infectious agent (contagium vivum fluidum), which he calls a virus.

1898 Löffler and Paul Frosch (1860 - 1928) make the same observation but in animals, with foot-and-mouth disease.

1898 The Bayer Drug Company markets heroin as a "non-addictive" anti-cough medicine.

1898-1904 Walter Bradford Cannon (1871 - 1945) uses X-rays to study the movements of the digestive system.

1899 Francis Gotch (1853 - 1913) describes a "refractory phase" between nerve impulses.

1899 August Bier (1861-1949) uses cocaine for intraspinal anesthesia.

1899 William Bate Hardy (1864-1934) points out that many of the appearances of cytoplasm are artifacts of the staining and fixing methods that were employed; therefore, the existence of cytoplasmic structures should be confirmed by alternative methods.

1899 An International Congress on Plant Hybridization is held in London as Mendelian principles gain rapid acceptance. This is sometimes recognized as the birth of Genetics.

1899 Conway Morgan pursues his work in experimental psychology, comparing a variety of animals, in Introduction to comparative psychology.

1899 Jacques Loeb (Mayen 1859 - New York 1924) after a couple of years at the Stazione zoologica in Napoli succeeds (following Roux) in bringing aboutt he development of sea urchin larvae from unfertilized eggs by exposing them to controlled changes in their environment. Much of his experimental work was done at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole.

1899 Creation in Saïgon of an Institut Antirabique, together with an Institut Vaccinogène and a bacteriology laboratory. In these institutes, which later formed the Institut Pasteur of Saïgon, snakes are collected en masse to prepare immune sera.

1899 David Hilbert (Königsberg 1862 - Göttingen 1943) publishes his Grundlagen der Geometrie which has the greatest influence in this domain since Euclid.

1899 Karl Blossfeldt (1865 - Berlin 1932) begins a long career in photography of plants by the thousands - photographs which feature flowers, buds, branched stems, clusters or seed capsules shot directly from the side, seldom from an overhead view, and rarely from a diagonal perspective.

Some significant dates 1900-1919

1800-1849

1900-1919

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