CHEMICAL PHYSIOLOGY. 33 



rounds them. Whether such a sweeping and almost revolutionary 

 notion will stand the test of further verification must be left to the 

 future; so also must the equally important idea that nervous impulses 

 are to be mainly explained on an electrolytic basis. But whether or 

 not all the details of such work will stand the test of time, the experi- 

 ments I have briefly alluded to are sufficient to show the importance 

 of physical chemistry to the physiologist, and they also form a useful 

 commentary on what I was saying just now about vitalism. Such 

 eminently' vital phenomena as movement and fertilization are to be 

 explained in whole or in part as due to the physical action of inorganic 

 substances. Are not such suggestions indications of the undesirability 

 of postulating the existence of any special mystic vital force ? 



I have spoken up to this point of physical chemistry as a branch 

 of inorganic chemistry; there are already indications of its importance 

 also in relation to organic chemistry. Many eminent chemists con- 

 sider that the future advance of organic chemistry will be on the new 

 physical lines. It is impossible to forecast where this will lead us; 

 suffice it to say that not only physiology, but also pathology, pharma- 

 cology, and even therapeutics, will receive new accessions to knowledge 

 the importance of which will be enormous. 



I have now briefly sketched what appear to me to be the two main 

 features of the chemical physiology of to-day, and the two lines, 

 organic and inorganic, along which I believe it will progress in the 

 future. 



Let me now press upon you the importance in physiology, as in all 

 experimental sciences, of the necessity first of bold experimentation, 

 and secondly of bold theorizing from experimental data. Without 

 experiment all theorizing is futile; the discovery of gravitation would 

 never have seen the light if laborious years of work had not convinced 

 Newton that it could be deduced from his observations. The Darwinian 

 theory was similarly based upon data and experiments which occupied 

 the greater part of its author's lifetime to collect and perform. 

 Pasteur in France and Virchow in Germany supply other instances of 

 the same devotion to work which was followed by the promulgation of 

 wide-sweeping generalizations. 



And after all it is the general law which is the main object of 

 research; isolated facts may be interesting and are often of value, but 

 it is not until facts are correlated and the discoveries ascertain their 

 interrelationships that anything of epoch-making importance is given 

 to the world. 



It is, however, frequently the case that a thinker with keen insight 

 can see the general law even before the facts upon which it rests are 

 fully worked out. Often such bold theorizers are right, but even if 



VOL. I.XII. 3. 



