This comprehensive account of vitalism and the German philosophy of nature in the eighteenth century proposes an innovative thesis. The author restates the theories formulated by the Gottingen School, but also shows that some of its central tenets are drawn directly from the Naturphilosophie developed in Jena. In this sense the Biologie consists substantially of a compilation of theories elaborated in the previous decades, yet Treviranus rearranges them in a unitary framework and interprets them with a peculiar emphasis on the interaction between organism and environment. On...