vital spontaneity. It is the statement that, under determined circumstances materially identical, the same vital phenomena will be identically reproduced.
Comparative Method.—Claude Bernard completed this critical work by laying down the laws of experiment on living beings. He commended as the rational method of research the comparative method. This should be, and is in fact, the daily instrument of all those who work in physiology. It compels the investigator in every research bearing on organized beings to institute a series of tests, such that the conditions which are unknown and impossible to know may be regarded as identical from one test to another; and when we are certain that a single condition is variable, it compels him to discover the character of the condition we are dealing with, and to learn to appreciate, and to measure its influence. It is safe to say that the errors which are daily committed in biological work have their cause in some infraction of this golden rule. In physical science the obligation to follow the comparative method is much less felt. In most cases the witness test[1] is useless. In physiology the witness test is indispensable.*
- ↑ In an article on the experimental method recently published in the Dictionnaire de Physiologie, M. Ch. Richet writes as follows:—"We must therefore never cease to carry out comparative experiments. I do not hesitate to say that this comparison is the basis of the experimental method." It is in fact what was taught by Claude Bernard in maxim and by example. It is no exaggeration to assert that nine-tenths of the errors which take place in research work are imputable to some breach of this method. When an investigator makes a mistake, save in the case of material error, it is almost certainly due to the fact that he has neglected to carry out one of the comparative
