This position was met with some opposition, as Erwin A. Esper (1968) notes, "Oertel (1901, p. 59) commented on 'the ill-advised and misleading metaphors in which linguistic writers indulged, borrowing their terms from the dissecting-room and the physiological and biological laboratories,' and referred to denunciations of the biological analogy by Gaston Paris, Osthoff and Brugmann, Wundt, and V. Henry" (Esper 1968:99). The concern that borrowing methodology from a relatively unrelated discipline could mislead linguistics should the analogy be taken too seriously was a very real one. Schleicher referred to "linguistic organisms", and concepts from Darwinian evolution were judiciously applied to language in attempting a historical-comparative approach to language study (Esper 1968:97). However, because these decades marked the general emergence of modern linguistic methodology, it set up an ideal for objective analysis which was felt to be necessary for the separation and defining of a linguistic science.