...This study traces the gestation of German biology from the debate about organism between Stahl and Leibniz to the formulation of developmental morphology in the era of Kielmeyer and Schelling. Over the eighteenth century, inspired by the “Queries” in Newton’s Opticks, “experimental Newtonianism...

... Newtonian.” He had been schooled at the University of Leiden medical school under Herman Boerhaave at the moment when Dutch experimental Newtonianism became the most powerful force in European natural inquiry. Tracing his gradual grasp of the significance of this new impulse, culminating...