THE SIGNS OF LIFE [LECT. 



active student not merely a learnt man, but a 

 man. 



And that leads me to what we hope is to be the keynote 

 and dominant tone of these lectures namely, that they are 

 especially to belong to what may be termed the growing surface 

 of our knowledge. Each one of us is to bring here the know- 

 ledge that he has himself gathered at first hand in the particular 

 garden that he has chosen to work in, and of such knowledge it 

 is an infallible characteristic that it is unsatisfied, incomplete 

 an ever green surface, a surface of encroachment. 



And so this, our talking-room, rests upon a foundation of 

 working-rooms, and these in turn ultimately rest upon our 

 working-rooms scattered throughout the colleges of the University 

 of London, at University College, at King's College, at the 

 London medical colleges, and at the colleges for women. 



Another point : A critic, a friendly critic, in the days when 

 these lectures were first talked of, wanted to know to whom they 

 were to be given, urged indeed that in this great scattered 

 University of London there are not a dozen students requiring 

 or caring for advanced lectures in physiology ; he said that we 

 should have to lecture to each other. I hope we shall lecture to 

 each other and be each other's pupils. Looking to this list, I 

 think I may say that during the last twenty years I have been 

 the pupil of every one of my present colleagues, and I hope I 

 have not finished learning from them ; and I am very sure that 

 if this laboratory fulfils its true function, we, the professed 

 teachers, will receive as well as give instruction from and to the 

 students and frequenters of the laboratory. 



2. Subject. The subject-matter of physiology is Life or 

 more properly speaking living things, vegetable as well as 

 animal. And although physiologists, in common with all man- 

 kind, must at times indulge themselves in speculations concerning 

 the origin of life, the existence of vital force, the immortality of 

 protoplasm and other insoluble philosophical problems, their real 

 daily work is the hardly less extensive task of learning how 

 plants and animals live, in what particulars their living organs 

 and tissues differ from the same organs and tissues when they 



