The President's Address. By G. S. Woodhead. 127 



only turn some twenty or thirty of our members into the various 

 Medical Schools of the kingdom, there to instruct first our junior 

 students, and then those engaged in research, in the finer working 

 and wonderful possibilities of the modern Microscope, the rate of 

 advance of medical knowledge would be enormously speeded up. 

 Pondering this matter, it has struck me that in Cambridge we 

 have mercies for which we are not sufficiently thankful, and 

 opportunities that we have failed to seize. Why, I put it to 

 myself, should not our distinguished Secretary, with his knowledge 

 of technique, be called upon to help us in providing for the men 

 who are studying histology, normal and pathological, and bac- 

 teriology, sound teaching on the optical and mechanical principles 

 on which are based the construction and use of the Microscope, 

 in order that they may utilize to the full this wonderful instrument. 

 My desire — and hope — is that ere long our best students, at any 

 rate, may have some opportunity of acquiring facility in the use 

 of the various types of sub-stage condenser, dark-ground illumina- 

 tion, monochromatic lighting, methods of measurement, ultra- 

 microscopic work, micro-spectroscopy, polarization, and the like. 

 Much of the rough work has been done with the simpler apparatus 

 of the past, the blocking and hewing, in the domain of histology 

 and cytology, bacteriology and protozoology. For further and 

 finer work, every available adventitious aid, most of them corning 

 to us through improvements in the structure and use of the Micro- 

 scope, must be called upon. How much has been done in recent 

 years only those can realize who have followed, in our Journal, 

 the reports of what has been done in the great working centres of 

 the microscopical world. Only they, too, can form any idea of 

 the tremendous additional powers of investigation that might be 

 placed in the hands of thousands of workers, were the facilities 

 for microscopical work increased. I am afraid that we Britons 

 are endowed with a natural repugnance to either giving or receiving 

 State grants for furthering the development and utilization of 

 brains. It may be that this repugnance is not so marked as it 

 was, but it is still so great that one cannot hope that this Society, 

 for example, may ever receive a grant for the encouragement of 

 research, for the improvement of the optical and mechanical parts 

 of the Microscope, or in aid of the diffusion of the knowledge 

 acquired as the result of the encouragement of technical work. 

 In the meantime, the researches of the brilliant and persevering 

 investigators who have placed our Society in the honourable 

 position it now holds in the scientific world, have helped to confer 

 benefits on sick and sound alike such as could not have been 

 realized fifty years ago, and the source of which is even now 

 inadequately, very inadequately, recognized. 



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