 In his preface, Wolff is full of praise for Sturm, especially because he believes to find in Sturm’s method an anticipation of his own tripartite division of knowledge into historical knowledge or knowledge of facts, philosophical knowledge or knowledge of causes, and mathematical knowledge or knowledge of the quantities of things put down in the first chapter of the Philosophia Rationalis (see  SEP entry on Christian Wolff,  sects. 3 and 7). However, Wolff is aware that mathematical quantification does not figure in Sturm’s method as prominently as the other two types of knowledge. Besides, Wolff compliments Sturm for establishing experimental teaching (collegia) — an academic novelty. Moreover, he looks very favorably on Sturm’s three physics, praising Sturm’s scientific method  (sect. 2),  and pointing out the very positive reception of the first part of the PE. He laments the absence of a third part (the pars specialissima) of the PE, which was supposed to deal with living beings. Sturm’s death prevented its termination and successive publication. However, in order to close this gap, Wolff directs the reader to the lecture of Honoré Fabri’s works on plants, animals and human beings. Indeed, Sturm himself had allegedly recommended to the editor to join Fabri’s writings on these matters with the two completed parts of the PE to provide a complete physics. Besides Fabri, in the preliminaries, Wolff directs the reader to the works of Gassendi, Clauberg, Du Hamel, La Forge, Cordemoy, Harvey, Perrault, Malpighi, Grew, and Ray to obtain knowledge about plants, animals, and especially the connection of the mind and the body in the human case.